Tokalı Church

Tokalı Kilise, the "Buckle Church", is the largest of the rock-cut churches of Göreme and, for many historians of Byzantine art, the finest. It stands a little apart from the cluster of chapels inside the Göreme Open Air Museum, just below the main entrance, and from outside it gives almost nothing away: a doorway in a tufa slope. Inside is not one church but four chambers hollowed out of the same volcanic rock over time: a single-aisled Old Church, a much larger New Church cut through its east wall, a side chapel and a Lower Church with a crypt beneath.

The Old Church, carved in the tenth century, is a barrel-vaulted room painted in soft reds and greens. Its vault reads like an illustrated book: three bands of narrative on each side, some thirty scenes of the Infancy, the Miracles and the Passion of Christ, running beneath a spine of medallions with prophets and saints. The painter followed the apocryphal Gospel of James rather than only the canonical gospels, so the sequence contains episodes rarely seen elsewhere, such as the murder of Zacharias and the flight of Elizabeth. Figures are flat and frontal, and some bystanders are given names drawn from what they do in the story, a regional habit that scholars have singled out.

Then the New Church opens up, and the colour changes. When it was carved in the later tenth century, the apse of the Old Church was sacrificed to make way for it. Here the backgrounds are an intense blue made from lapis lazuli brought from Badakhshan in present-day Afghanistan, a pigment so costly that it was seldom used for wall painting at all. Against it run a second Christological cycle, the first deacons, martyrs and a rare cycle from the life of St Basil, the great churchman of Cappadocia. Painted inscriptions name a painter, Nikephoros, and patrons called Constantine and his son Leo; the quality of the work, close to what was being painted in Constantinople, suggests a metropolitan workshop was brought to this valley. Some scholars have linked the patrons to the powerful Phokas family, but that remains a hypothesis.

Stand in the middle of the New Church and look up at the arcades and the blue vault: this is the closest Cappadocia comes to the luxury of a capital-city church, carved rather than built. The paintings were cleaned and conserved in the late twentieth century, and later conservation work has continued with international support.

Getting there

Tokalı Kilise lies beside the road up to the Göreme Open Air Museum, a short walk (around 15 minutes) from the village of Göreme. The town of Ürgüp is about 6 km away. The nearest airport is Nevşehir Kapadokya (NAV), about 30 km away; Kayseri is the other airport commonly used for Cappadocia.