A richly historical land with some of the best cuisine you will ever taste, the scenery from beaches to mountains, and the great city of İstanbul.
Cappadocia’s famous “fairy chimneys,” a surreal landscape of carved-out towering rock formations, was our next stop (🎫 65 TRY – valid also for Zelve Open Air Museum). The rock formations emerged due to a geological process that began millions of years ago. First, ancient volcanic...
Another crowded place, but still worth visiting, is the Zelve Open-Air Museum (🎫 65 TRY – valid also for Fairy Chimneys,🅿️ – 25 TRY), where three valleys of crumbling cave-habitations and churches converge. Zelve was a monastic retreat from the 9th to the 13th century and then a...
Aşıklar (Love) Valley in Cappadocia is a place of natural wonders. Famed for its phallic rock formations and rough mountain ridges, it is one of the most popular hiking trails in Cappadocia. The famous viewpoint (🅿️ – 30 TRY), where you can camp overnight, is located above the...
We hiked around perfectly pink Güllüdere (Rose) Valley rock formations the whole afternoon. The trails that loop around the valley are easily accessible to all levels of hikers and provide some of the finest fairy-chimney-strewn vistas in Cappadocia. As well as this, they hide fabulous...
Surrounded by epic sweeps of golden, moonscape valley, this remarkable touristic village hollowed out of the hills with the central “downtown” strip full of restaurants and travel agencies surrounded by boutique cave hotels. After we arrived in little Göreme, we walked to the viewpoint (🎫...
Uçhisar is a village in Cappadocia situated on the edge of Göreme National Park. The town was first mentioned in a 14th-century chronicle by Aziz ibn Ardasir although the general area had been occupied much earlier, perhaps from Hittite times. In the seventh century AD, the Byzantines...
The lovely and quiet tiny village of Soğanlı is 36km south of Mustafapaşa. We hiked for a few hours through its valleys – Aşağı (Lower) Soğanlı and Yukarı (Upper) Soğanlı. There are hidden several rock-cut churches carved from the soft tuff stone. Byzantine monks inhabited the valley from...
Another famous ancient multi-level underground city is located in Derinkuyu (🎫 100 TRY). It has cavernous rooms spread on seven levels reached by long skinny tunnels extending to a depth of approximately 85 meters. It is large enough to have sheltered as many as 20,000 people together...
Just a few kilometers from Ihlara Valley lies the little town of Güzelyurt, dramatically set beneath the snow-capped summit of Hasan Dağı. We came here for its stone houses, refuge caves, and underground city. It was a prosperous Ottoman-Greek town specializing in farming and goldsmithing...
We parked in the southwest Cappadocia next to a canyon rimmed by high cliffs that hide rock-cut churches. The 15 km long and up to 150 m deep canyon was formed in prehistoric times by the Melendiz River. From the 7th century AD, the valley was settled by Byzantine monks who dug their...