Fantastic Cappadocia, Turkey

We're back in Madrid now, and it feels a lot like home. Of course, it was our home for a couple of years…32 years ago. But, we still love it.

However, we've just spent 11 days in Turkey, and I think I've found my second favorite country. (The USA, of course, is disqualified from my favorites list due to excessive familiarity.)

So, in the next couple of days, I'm going to try to catch up on what we saw in Turkey. I've already commented on Gallipoli. But, of course there was a lot more and I'm going to spread it over a few entries on the blog.

I'm going to start with the last place we visited, Cappadocia, In a word: fantastic. In the literal sense. It's a fantasy land, both in terms of history and landscape. The region is a network of small towns that have one thing in common: the weird geology of the region lent itself over the ages to people digging caves to live in. And so they did.

And, if you look at a map, and know a little of the history of the Christian church, you'll see that this area also lent itself to becoming a true cradle for the infant church–a cradle which sheltered Christians in these caves for up to fifteen centuries.

Now, I don't know much about the early history of the church. But it is clear from the evidence that this area spawned a plethora of saints. If you include nearby Ephesus, you've even got the former homes of the evangelist St. John and Mary, the mother of Jesus, to bolster the region's historical cred…and tourism.

But Ephesus was a full fledged Roman/Greek city with marble columns and paved streets and sewer systems.  Goreme and the other cities of Cappadocia were small crude rooms dug into the soft volcanic soil of the middle of Turkey.

You pretty much have to see these places to believe them. In more than one mountain, the people dug down more than 90 meters below ground level and created hundreds of rooms–bedrooms, kitchens, toilets, store rooms–you name it–that housed thousands of people.

And, the dominant force was the church. Among these caves spread over such a large area are more than 230 churches. Most of them are the size of a large American living room. There are 25 churches within the open air park in Goreme alone.

Now, this is all one big tourism site. And a fascinating one. You should go, because the very softness of the earth which allowed the digging of all those caves so many years ago is now causing their destruction. The reason why you see so many caves and doors and rooms open to the side of the mountains now is that the sides of the mountains have eroded away, or in many cases, simply fallen down.

You see doors 30 meters above the current ground level because 30 meters of ground has been washed away over the last 700 years.

Our guide told us that more and more sites are being closed all the time because they're becoming unstable.

So go soon.

Note: This post and other posts on TravelPast50.com may contain paid or affiliate advertising links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.