As all things end, so did this: With an overnight bus trip to a place where people live in caves. Really, more like lived in caves, but I’ll talk more on that in a bit. First, the bus. Not bad at all. Some years ago, in part of its ongoing quest to reach “European” levels of “development,” Turkey made a choice. The terrain here is extreme, and high-speed trains were not going to be a great choice. Low speed trains would be limited by the fact that they are HUGE and require a branching-spokes type map, and if the trip on each segment is long (as it is in extreme terrain), they are obnoxious and nobody wants to use them (see: USA). They opted, then, to make Turkey’s TGV be a network (a DENSE network) of long-range bus routes subject to uniform standards, and that run like clockwork. What I’m saying is that our bus was on time to the minute, and had a, well, not flight attendant, but like that. The seats were assigned, and the vehicle itself was a shiny new-looking Mercedes motor coach… carpeted with Turkish carpets. It still took 10 hours, but hey. Whatever.
Arrival in Göreme, main square: Rent this, rent that, book any kind of tour imaginable, best café, real best café, etc. This is not an undiscovered place. It is early in the morning, though, and we are tired, so we head straight to the hotel to check in and get some rest.
The hotel we booked is the Kelebek, Lonely Planet’s pick for mid-priced accommodation in Göreme. It has been put together from several old cave homes that are attached by tunnels. Yes, that is correct.
A long, long time ago, well before humans came to these parts, there were three great central Anatolian volcanoes, and they erupted and buried this whole area hundreds of feet thick in various layers of ash and lava. These became tuff and basalt, respectively. Water did its thing for millions of years and cracked and eroded the basalt. When the tuff was exposed, being much softer, it eroded very quickly in comparison to the basalt. Over time this formed very tall stone towers capped with basalt. In these parts, these things are called “fairy chimneys” for reasons that will become clear, sort of. In other parts, the basalt is more-or-less intact as a capstone, and in yet other parts, all the basalt is gone and the tuff eroded freeform into formations the locals just call “cream.” The general effect is sort of like Bryce Canyon NP in the US, but that is where the similarities end. First, this is basically a network of valleys in the central Anatolian plateau, which is not a forest but a hotly-contested plain on every major trade route of the past few millennia. Second, people saw these crazy stone things and saw a place to live.
It turns out that tuff is really easy to dig out, even with tools made of obsidian, which it even comes with automatically. Once dug out, the newly exposed surface subsequently hardens due to oxidation and becomes much stronger over the course of a couple days. Pre-literate people took to living in caves here, as elsewhere, but unlike elsewhere, they could shape their caves more easily than they could find building materials in the surrounding areas, so they never moved out. They built rooms, tunnels, ovens, storage areas, places for livestock, defensive positions and things like that into the hillsides and rock outcroppings. Skipping forward, now, to recorded history, Christians fleeing from early efforts at persecution found this place just past the edge of civilization where they could hide effectively in caves. Thus was founded what seems to be a serious proclivity for building monasteries in large cave complexes with churches, convents, secluded chambers for hermits, pilgrims, the whole monastic shebang, really. Obviously, once they got big, they couldn’t be hidden anymore, but they were founded here (so I’m told) because on this plain, frequented by passing armies, you can see for miles, and any structure would be noticed. Anything built into the ground, however, was not going to be noticed from a distance. Eventually there were hundreds of churches, lined with frescos, hermits, pilgrims, and you know what? They’re still there, just with pilgrims changed to tourists.
It makes sense, then, that the monasteries wouldn’t be the only underground attractions. Indeed, at some point in the last few decades (I forget when), a local farmer looking for a lost chicken that he could hear squawking but couldn’t see, found it at the bottom of a ventilation shaft for an 80 meter deep underground city that once held 3000 people. Looking around a little more, several of these cities were discovered, and archaeologists began studies and excavations.
The underground cities were places that entire towns (also caves, just visible from the outside) could flee to, with their livestock, in the event that hostiles were approaching, leaving an apparently abandoned village behind for their enemies to gloat over. Their underground places were hidden, but also designed to be nearly impossible to attack, with narrow single-file stooped position access tunnels, arrow slots in the floor where defenders could fire upward at entering parties, and giant stone discs that several men could roll into place only from the inside. Ventilation shafts were vertical and hundreds of feet deep, doubling as wells. How well did all of this work? Unfortunately, that is lost to history.
People here continued to live in and build their caves until the 1960s, when the government essentially condemned the cave houses (The landforms are made by erosion, which continues to happen, but faster, once they are mined out, and collapses involve hundred ton boulders & such). They then moved into more typical houses right next to their old cave villages. Recently, many of the old caves that are still in particularly good condition have been converted to hotels. The economy is tourism and farming (most famously apricots, but also wheat, pumpkins, and mulberries).
This is the very short version of the history of Cappadocia, which is old Persian for The Land of Beautiful Horses. We have now been here for a couple of days, so in the next post I’ll show some pictures of what we’ve done and seen.
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