In Cappadocia: a photo essay

I have a bad case of itchy feet. We haven’t been able to travel abroad for a while. And my wanderlust wasn’t helped by a recent well-meaning but painful reminder from Google that ‘on this day last year’ I arrived in Cappadocia, in central Turkey, after a cross-country bus journey from Istanbul (that I’ll maybe tell you about some other time).

Of course, recent bad news from Turkey makes the memories even more bittersweet. I pour myself a cup of apple tea that we brought home from the Grand Bazaar in the Turkish capital, and reconstruct the story of the images plucked from the cloud. You may have seen photos of the iconic ‘fairy chimneys’ of this part of Cappadocia - if not, think of the anthill-like lairs of the creatures in Pitch Black. Formed by the erosion of light volcanic rock called tufa, they seem to belong on some blistering exoplanet. But in fact, the peoples of this region have made their homes in the rock formations for centuries. For millennia.

The rock is too friable to carve into blocks for building, but easily cut into. The doors and windows in the chimneys are obvious, but across Cappadocia you’ll find villages, towns, even small cities mined from the hillsides and plains. When Roman legions and barbarian hordes, Turkic and Persian and Ottoman armies pillaged the region, these underground cities offered shelter and security. The cool chambers - for animals as well as people, for the storage of supplies and for religious worship - plunge deep into the earth, linked by networks of low tunnels and ventilation shafts.

Back on the surface, early Christian religious communities withdrew into their own tufa-carved settlements. It might seem odd to talk about a community of hermits, but just outside Goreme the rock churches seem piled one on top of another. Crowded with tourists when we visited, this outdoor museum buzzed like a holy wasps’ nest. Selfie-sticks bristled like antennae between the frescoes and empty grave-niches.

Later, we found the El Nazar Church in Zemi valley, paid the caretaker a small fee to unlock the chimney’s door, and savoured the frescoes in hot silence.

Here, as everywhere, ancient iconoclasts and more modern Muslim locals had scratched the eyes from the saints and martyrs.

At dawn on I think our second or third day we set off on a hike through one of the gorges that rivers and streams - invisible and hardly imaginable in the parching late summer heat - have cut through the rock. The troglodyte natives have more or less abandoned the landscape for the towns and cities, but the trail through the valley was marked by dozens of smallholdings. Scarecrows stood sentry over pumpkin plots. Cherry and quince trees dropped their fruit on the dusty ground. Families, we were told, still drove from their modern homes, with their satellite dishes and Turkish flags draped from balconies, to tend these plots.

As we walked, and the sunlight broached the rim of the gorge, the pigeons who gave the valley its name fluttered through the scrub and wheeled overhead. On the cliff faces and in the fairy chimneys, the smallholders’ ancestors had carved dovecotes, and every year, masked, they climb unsteady-looking ladders to open them up and scrape out the ammoniac guano to fertilise their plots.

After an hour or two, we scrambled up the valley side onto a metalled roadway that curved uphill to the small town of Uchisar, a cluster of buildings around a giant version of the fairy chimneys, a castle-like hill overlooking the Cappadocian plain.

We climbed the winding staircase, sometimes in the body of the rock, sometimes traversing its flank, until we reached the battlements. In the distance, the volcanoes whose ancient eruptions had blasted out the tufa shimmered in the haze. The wind seemed to blow, not from north or east or anywhere on the surface of the planet, but from deep underground.