Like the rest of Turkey, Kapadokya has some miles on its tires. It dates back to the late Bronze Age, about 2,000 BC, and was the Hittite’s homeland. These days it’s a craft center, with long traditions in both ceramics and rugs, but the real attraction is what draws the balloons. Balloons haven’t coalesced around the area because of some fluke of updraft aerodynamics. It’s because what you can see from the air here is so unusual: Fairy chimneys. Thankfully, the view from the ground is just as amazing.

As is the view from way up in the air, on the right, flying in from Istanbul. That looks like a painting.

Fairy chimneys are a weird geological phenomenon that look just like… fairy chimneys! They’re spread out over a wide enough area that it takes cars to get from place to place. In retrospect, the smart thing would have been to hire a car and private guide to take us around, but we booked two days of group tours.

We could also have rented a car for the day and made our own way, but we’ve pretty much boycotted car rentals except for dire circumstances. I rented a car for two days in Oaxaca at the beginning of our journey, and I didn’t care for it. I didn’t like being responsible for someone else’s expensive property, and that was before a tiny fender ding cost me $600.

Our Hotel

I know, I know. Fairy chimneys. That’s the whole point. But I have to take a moment to call out our hotel. We got a nicer hotel than we usually do for these sorts of side trips. We’re always doubling up on housing costs when we road trip, because we’re still maintaining our Airbnb home base, so we tend to be pretty budget conscious. But we splurged a little bit, and it was worth it.

First, most of the Kapadokya hotels call themselves cave hotels, but most aren’t really built into the caves of the fairy chimneys. A few, but they go way beyond splurge. Most of the hotels fake it by slathering plaster over stone, which is what our hotel did, but to excellent, silly effect. The rooms were definitely cave-like.

But the setting of the hotel itself was marvelous. Lush and abundant plantings, a lovely small pool that we always had to ourselves, a convenient location, and staff that made us feel completely at home. I reviewed it on hotels.com, which I hardly ever do.

Enjoy the slideshow while you listen to the call to prayer echo across the valley.

The neighborhood itself had much to offer. Some of the other hotels were amazing for their own reasons, and the views were beautiful.

Fairy Chimneys!

Finally, the main attraction. It’s why you’re here. Admit it.

Honestly, it’s why everyone is here. After Tunisia’s comparative desolation, Turkey’s dense thicket of tourists is a little off-putting. I realize we’re part of the problem, but it doesn’t make it any easier to shoulder through crowds when you’re just trying to soak up the culture.

Let’s start at the top with Ortahisar Castle, the king of the fairy chimneys. It’s 300′ tall and is purported to be the world’s first multistory dwelling.

The fairy chimneys are spread throughout the region. According to our guide, Yasin, it takes about 800 years for the mountains to calve a fresh fairy chimney. That seems unusually fast in geologic terms, but who am I to argue with Yasin? ChatGPT, on the other hand, is happy to call him out, claiming it takes tens of thousands of years. The Smithsonian claims millions. Since they’re the result of volcanic activity and the local volcano has been dormant for all of recorded history, I’m going to say… longer than 800 years.

Yasin also claimed that the word phonetics derived from the word Phoenician, since the Phoenicians were alphabet pioneers. Yeah, no.

And then there were the very special fairy chimneys from Paşabağ Monks Valley. Chimney? Is that what you first thought of when you saw this? Liar.

We were able to visit someone’s house in the area around Uçhisar Castle. Most of the fairy chimney residents were moved out in the 50s, but it’s still possible to rent from the government if you’ve got a good story. The family that lives in this space also uses it as a gift shop and offers free tours, a usage that passes government muster.

Still, it’s a tough life. Solar panels provide power, when it’s sunny, and water is carried in by the bucket. I forgot to ask about sewage, but there’s clearly no sewer system, so… On the other hand, rents are probably cheap. On yet another hand, your landlord is the government. It’s not exactly a sweetheart deal.

Many of the fairy chimneys had rooms accessible to the public, so you really got a feeling for how the spaces were used.

Let’s talk about pigeons, shall we? The harvesting of pigeon poop to use as fertilizer was long one of the primary economic drivers for the region. Not so much anymore, although there’s still plenty of guano to go around. There are millions of pigeons in Pigeon Valley alone, so many they got to name it.

In Olde Tymes, pigeon roosts were created in the fairy chimneys and painted on the outside so pigeons would notice them. Pigeons would come in, roost and poop, and then the roosts would be harvested of guano quarterly. A pretty sweet deal for everyone, although it does cast humans as the remoras and pigeons as the sharks. Weird.

In addition to the fairy chimneys themselves, the entire area is like a textbook on how geology is the unsung hero of crazy science. Take that, quarks. It’s like a mashup of the American Southwest and The Land That Time Forgot.

Everywhere there’s a wide spot on one of the bluffs overlooking the valley, enterprising folks have set up snack stands, souvenir shops, and posed photo ops. You can even ride a camel or a pony. The camels aren’t native, they’re just there for the tourists. Gypsies import them from Syria, Iraq, and Iran at about €10k a head, and have to earn that investment back in photos €5 – €10 a pop. No one said it was easy being a Gypsy.

Is Kapadokya nothing but fairy chimneys and crazy geology? Nope. There are whole cities underground and entire churches carved out of stone.

Kaymakli Underground City

There are eleven known underground cities in the area, but Kaymakli is the one that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s seven layers deep, but only the first four floors are open to the public. And those floors have been only partially restored to be safely accessible. Only a fraction of the city is available to tourists.

While the fairy chimneys offered natural caves that locals took advantage of, Kaymakli is entirely hand carved from the soft volcanic tuff. The caves date back to the Phrygians in the 8th–7th centuries BC, but were dramatically expanded by Byzantine Christians, who used them for protection from raids during the Arab–Byzantine wars (780–1180), and then again for protection from Mongol raids in the 14th century. As recently as the 1920s, Greek Christians took refuge there from occasional Ottoman oppression.

Their history as both home and sanctuary manifests in a couple of interesting ways. There are multiple passages that can be sealed off by rolling specially carved round stones over the entrances. And there are a considerable number of holes in the floor that would be known to residents but be a trap to invaders who didn’t know the layout.

Peak population estimates for Kaymakli range from 3,000-5,000 up to 10,000+. These really were cities. In fact, Kaymakli was connected to the largest of the underground cities, Derinkuyu, through a tunnel over six miles long. Derinkuyu was estimated to have a peak population of over 20,000. Shoulder had been put to wheel over an extended period.

Göreme Open Air Museum

We visited the Göreme Open Air Museum on Day Three all by ourselves. No tour, no guide. Just us, as god intended. Yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site, it’s not a museum in any normal sense. Rather, it’s a site you can explore.

Monks found the site in the 800s and carved a monastery out of the soft stone. As the location became known for its spirituality, it started attracting pilgrims, and the pilgrims started carving out chapels, leading to the thicket of sacred sites that make up the current museum. While the monks arrived in the 800s, the churches and refectories date from the 10th and 11th centuries. Each of the churches contains Byzantine painted wall murals, in varying degrees of both artistic quality and condition.

Sadly, I can’t really share pictures with you, because of the blanket prohibition on photography inside the churches. Truthfully, I think it was for traffic control, not preservation. If it was for preservation, a ban on flash photography would have done the trick. But if pictures were permitted everyone would take three times as long in each church, waiting for the right shot. I certainly would have. The museum is the single most visited attraction in Kapadokya, and the crowds would slow to a crawl without the ban.

Thank goodness the exteriors were interesting in their own right.

The most interesting exterior belonged to the Karanlik Kilise, commonly known as the Dark Church. There are painted elements on the outside, although the interior is, obviously, where the action is.

Needless to say, there are pictures of the interiors online. Normally I’m happy to scrape a photo, but it takes a number of pictures to tell the story, and that’s more theft than I’m comfortable committing. Instead, here’s a link to an especially good photo essay on the interior of the churches. She does a great job of taking you inside and providing that you-are-there perspective. She even has a video of the Dark Church.

One of the most interesting things about the interior art is that almost every piece has been defaced. Literally. The faces have been scraped off. The churches stopped being actively used around 1100, and it’s likely they were the victims of the Byzantine practice of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm, and I did not know this, literally means break icons, and was the Byzantine response to a perceived excess of veneration for the images themselves, rather than those represented by the images. It was a thou shalt not, after all. Scratching out the faces was a way to symbolically neutralize the power of the image. It also appears to be the original meaning of the word deface.

Of course, while it was forbidden to take pictures inside, if one were to find oneself inside one of the churches, and were that church to be momentarily bereft of either guards or other tourists, and if one’s wife was willing to watch the door, one might be able to sneak a few optically neutral, flash-free photos.

Balloons

While we might be personally earthbound, it’s not like we don’t appreciate the pageant of a good balloon show. It used to be a free-for-all here, but the local government decided that the number of balloons offended decency and common sense. It’s now limited to 200 balloons at a time. That’s still a lot of fucking balloons.

I was up early enough one morning to capture at least some of the spectacle.

Shopping

The nature of the group tours is that they always take you to some commercial ventures that compensate them. I get it. It greases the local economy. It happened on the Ephesus tour and we knew it would happen on our Kapadokya tours. We went to two shopping locations each day, and they were, with one exception, atrocious.

At one point early in our stay in Istanbul we mentioned to someone that we wouldn’t be getting a rug in Turkey. We were out of floor space, having picked up rugs in Mexico, Morocco, and Tunisia to go with our previous Kashmiri rug. Well, my dears, pearls were clutched. It was unthinkable that we would come to Turkey and leave without a rug. Confessing to ritual child murders would have engendered a less dramatic response.

So we were resigned to getting another rug, and we had every reason to believe that Kapadokya was the right place to give in. When our first commercial stop on Day One was Bazaar 54, a government run rug store with fixed prices, we were cautiously optimistic that we weren’t about to be fleeced.

They had rugs in all different qualities and price ranges, but we quickly zeroed in on their knotted pile rugs, which seemed to be a specialty. All of our other rugs are woven on traditional looms, where the shuttle takes the horizontal weft yarn through the vertical warp threads to create the pattern.

In a knotted pile rug, the weft threads are structural, like the warp threads, and yarn is hand knotted at the intersection of warp and weft. One by one. Individually. For the entire rug. After a weft row is completed a comb is used to push the yarn down and tighten the weave and the knotted threads are trimmed to a consistent height, creating the pile and setting up the next weft row.

The knots are tied with either wool or silk yarn, and the warp and weft threads are either wool or cotton. A wool/wool rug is the coarsest, a wool/cotton rug allows for more detail, and a silk/cotton rug has incredibly tight knots and an insane level of detail. And the price to match.

The other variable is how the fibers are dyed. Traditional dyes are natural, based on plants, shells, insects, and the like. Chemical aniline dyes are cheaper, easier to use, and more consistent. But the color variation of natural dyes is part of the appeal, making the uniformity of the aniline dyes look a little harsh to our eyes by comparison.

Natural dyed wool yarns on the right.

With little actual floor space (at this point, we’re envisioning nomad-style stacked rugs in our Chicago apartment), we settled for something small, 50″ x 30″. We wanted wool/cotton, natural dyes, and a traditional Anatolian motif. Nothing moderne. That quickly got us to this.

That’s just objectively spectacular. Also the most we’ve paid for a rug, including the much larger silk Kashmiri rug we bought in Mumbai. But that’s what it takes to get a hand knotted rug.

The Dregs

The other three places we went on our tours failed to clear the high bar set by Bazaar 54. They didn’t even ooze out of the slime. Our second stop on Day One was a ceramics shop. So far, so good. Ceramics and rugs are Cappadocia’s key crafts, and this place had undeniably beautiful work. It was just insanely overpriced. We eyed a lovely bowl and choked when we discovered it was $600. The cheapest, most meager of their bowls was $60. They were operating at about 5-10X going rates. I’m fine with fueling the local economy, but I don’t much care to be mistaken for an endowment. Or a sucker.

But Day Two had us nostalgic for Day One. While we’d never have bought anything at the ceramics store, their wares were at least culturally relevant. Someone who was interested in Turkey would be interested in the rugs and ceramics we saw on Day One, whether they purchased anything or not. But the shops we went to on Day Two were examples of Turkey’s ability to manufacture high-end designer goods. They spoke to Turkey’s industry and had nothing to say about Turkey’s culture.

The first stop was a leather store, where we were hoping to see some actual leather handicrafts. Instead, we got a replay of the leather store we saw on our Ephesus tour, complete with cheesy runway show and $1,300 Louis Vuitton and Burberry coats minus the designer label. Our second stop was an “onyx workshop,” which was nothing of the kind. It was an expensive designer jewelry manufacturer, priced like the leather and ceramics shops. I found a single stud earring with a stone I liked, but was unwilling to pay $100 for it.

The whole arrangement was insulting. We’d paid for these tours, but we were being treated as economic assets to be delivered by the vanful. Because of all the shopping fluff, it took two days and two tours to see Kapadokya. If we’d hired a private guide and car we could have seen it in a single day, at our own pace, and probably wouldn’t have spent any more.

It’s a learning, and the next time we need to visit a place that requires being driven around, we’ll skip the group tours. Thank you, Kapadokya!

But Wait, There’s More…

Thankfully, those weren’t our only shopping opportunities in Kapadokya. Göreme, the town we were staying in, had plenty of shops with high quality, reasonably priced wares. While we’d 100% capped out on rugs, we seem to have an insatiable appetite for ceramics. Amongst the many options, we felt two shops stood out. Both were, unsurprisingly, owned and operated by the craftsmen making the ceramics.

Hattuşa Seramik, named after the Hittite capital, specialized in Hittite-era designs. Pieces were being painted in the front of the shop.

As beautiful as that work was, the highlight for us was Göreme Seramik. The shop, which has been open for 22 years, exclusively represents a collective of five brothers, with their workshop and training going back to their grandfather.

Their specialty was the Anatolian textured ceramics, whose raised dots of glaze require a third firing. It’s a traditional approach and can be seen everywhere, but not necessarily at the eye bleeding level of detail offered by the five brothers, especially the shopkeeper’s husband. It’s a fine line between genius and madness. I feel for the woman.

And while ceramics and rugs might take top billing, there’s another Turkish art form easily as rich and traditional: Ebru. It’s a paper marbling technique that can also be applied to fabric, leather, and ceramics. We were lucky enough to track down Art House Ebru Sanat Evi in the neighboring town of Ürgüp, a short taxi ride there and almost a walk back (we followed a taxi that was dropping off a fare in order to get an empty cab).

Pigments are dropped onto an oil base, manipulated to create the desired shapes, and then transferred directly to the substrate. We got a demo which shows the process end-to-end.

Dorothy bought a silk scarf, I got a baseball cap (which worries me, since I’ve left three caps in taxis so far, but I think the Ebru will make it harder to miss), and we picked up a pair of marbled paper pieces.

And that put an end to our Kapadokya tour. The road trips are another learning. While we home base in cities with a lot going on, if we truly want to know a place we have to get out and explore. We took an epic two week road trip in Tunisia, which included our life changing week in the Sahara, and even added a day trip to Dougga and Bulla Regia. We really saw Tunisia. I think we’d have enjoyed Morocco more if we’d gotten out of the cities and explored, although we did take multi-day trips to Fes and Essaouira. But Dorothy was immediately post hip replacement when we hit Morocco (literally blaming the victim), so we were a little constrained on adventuring. Now she’s clearly up for anything.

We return to Istanbul for a final four days before starting our trek back to the US. Our first stop is actually Tunis. When we decided to go to Turkey instead of the US, we already had our tickets to go to Chicago from Tunis. We could change the dates, but we couldn’t exchange the tickets. So we’re headed back to Tunis to regroup for a couple of days before the long haul to the US and another adventure: moving in to our new apartment.