Cappadocia

Central Anatolian volcanic region of fairy chimneys, cave churches, frescoes, and underground cities.

Cappadocia is one of Turkey's most extraordinary landscapes — a high volcanic plateau in central Anatolia where millions of years of eruption, erosion, and human ingenuity have produced something unlike anywhere else on earth. The famous peri bacaları — fairy chimneys — are columns of soft volcanic tuff capped with harder basalt, carved by wind and rain into cones, spires, mushrooms, and stranger shapes. What makes Cappadocia uniquely compelling is that people have lived inside this rock for thousands of years: early Christians carved entire church complexes into the hillsides, Byzantine monks painted frescoes in underground chapels, and whole populations retreated into elaborate underground cities when invaders swept across the plateau.

The beating heart of the region is Göreme, a small town encircled by valleys of fairy chimneys, whose Open-Air Museum preserves thirty rock-cut Byzantine churches from the 10th to 13th centuries. Ürgüp offers a slightly more polished base, with boutique cave hotels and Cappadocia's own wine industry. Avanos is the pottery town, sitting on the red banks of the Kızılırmak river. South of these three, the underground city of Derinkuyu descends eight storeys into the earth — one of hundreds of such cities in the region, capable of sheltering tens of thousands of people.

The Ihlara Valley in the southwest is a deeply cut gorge of the Melendiz river, with more than forty rock churches carved into its walls — less visited than Göreme and more rewarding for it. Zelve is an abandoned troglodyte village where people lived in the carved cones until the 1950s. Uçhisar crowns the highest natural rock castle in the region, with panoramic views across the valleys. And Hacıbektaş is a pilgrimage town for followers of the Bektashi order, whose great 13th-century saint is buried there.

For most visitors, the dawn hot-air balloon flights — rising above the chimneys as the sun picks out every fold in the landscape — are the single most memorable experience in Turkey. Book in advance and allow for cancellation by wind. Cappadocia rewards slow travel: the valleys are best walked, the light changes dramatically through the day, and the wine at sunset in Ürgüp needs no justification.