Things to Do in Cappadocia

The region's core is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia, inscribed on 6 December 1985 under four criteria — a rare mixed cultural and natural listing.

UNESCO's own description calls it a volcanic landscape sculpted by erosion into ridges, valleys and pinnacles known as fairy chimneys, containing rock-hewn sanctuaries, troglodyte villages and subterranean cities. Its citation records that the rock dwellings, villages, convents and churches "retain the fossilized image of a province of the Byzantine Empire between the 4th century and the arrival of the Seljuk Turks."

How the landscape was made. Volcanic eruptions laid down thick sheets of ash and pumice that hardened into ignimbrite. The oldest of these, the Kavak ignimbrite, is less than ten million years old and between 10 and 150 metres thick; it is mostly unwelded and erodes easily, which is why the region became the most characteristic badlands topography in Türkiye — and why people could cut homes into it with hand tools. The Zelve ignimbrite above it, 9.2 million years old, is harder. Where a hard cap sits on a soft body, the soft rock erodes away beneath it and a fairy chimney is left standing. At Devrent a second mechanism did the work: hot gas escaping through the rock baked and hardened the material around each vent, and the softer surroundings washed away.

The single most important site in Cappadocia, and the reason the region is on the World Heritage List.

It is a valley of churches, chapels, refectories and living quarters cut into rock, which hosted monastic life intensively from the 4th century AD to the 13th. Göreme is considered the place where the monastic education system began, a model later repeated at Soğanlı, Ihlara and Açıksaray.

The structures open to visitors include the Nunnery and the Monastery, and the churches of St Basil, Elmalı, St Barbara, Yılanlı, Karanlık, Çarıklı and Tokalı.

Karanlık Kilise — the Dark Church — is the one to make time for, and it carries a separate entrance ticket. It dates from the late 11th to early 12th century: a cross plan with a central dome, four columns and three apses. It is called dark because only a small window in the narthex lets light in, and that is exactly why its frescoes survive so vividly — the Nativity, the Baptism, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension.

The museum is 1.5 km from the centre of Göreme village.

A single rock at the highest point of Cappadocia, hollowed into rooms linked by staircases, tunnels and passages — and sealed, where needed, by the same round millstone doors used in the underground cities. Many of the rooms on the north side are pigeon houses.

Geologically it is a witness hill: the Kavak ignimbrite around it eroded away and this mass survived, which is why geologists use the height difference between such peaks and the plateau to measure how much rock the region has lost.

It stands 5 km from Göreme, on the Nevşehir–Göreme road, and it is the best vantage point over Pigeon Valley.

Pigeon Valley (Güvercinlik) runs between Göreme and Uçhisar. It is named for the dovecotes carved into the soft tuff, their fronts opened wide and their interiors lined with nesting niches. The birds were not kept for meat: their droppings were collected as fertiliser for the region's poor soil, a practice going back to antiquity. The pigeons no longer earn their keep, but the rock houses are still looked after.

Love Valley (Aşk Vadisi) sits in Göreme, between the Avanos and Göreme roads, and holds the most striking capped fairy chimneys in the region — slender bodies of grey-green lake sediment under Kavak ignimbrite caps. Thick lake deposits on the valley floor and deep seasonal-stream erosion produced them.

Devrent Valley, on the Ürgüp–Avanos road, is the odd one out: it has no churches, no Roman tombs and no rock-cut dwellings at all. It is known instead for chimneys that look like animals — the camel is the famous one and now has a fence around it. It is also called Imagination Valley, because you look rather than walk, and Pink Valley, for the colour the rock turns at sunset.

Kızılçukur (Red Valley) lies between Ortahisar and Çavuşin and runs for roughly 1.5 km, through several tunnels — the longest about 37 metres, ending in a steep 20-metre descent — past the Üzümlü Church, joining the Meskendir Valley and coming out at Çavuşin. Its terraces are where people gather in the late afternoon for the sunset.

Both are 5 km from Avanos and are administered as a single site.

Paşabağ was once called the Valley of the Priests. Its fairy chimneys are multi-bodied and multi-headed — twins and even triplets, which is unusual even by Cappadocian standards. One three-headed cone holds a chapel built in the name of St Simeon, with a hermit's cell inside it; Simeon was the 5th-century ascetic who lived on increasingly tall columns near Aleppo. The structure of these chimneys is legible from outside: Zelve ignimbrite cap, lake-sediment neck, Kavak ignimbrite body.

Zelve is three valleys on the northern slopes of Aktepe. The first holds a mill for making bulgur, the Balıklı and Üzümlü churches and a winery; the second the Church of the Holy Cross; the third a monastery complex carved into a dome of rock. Pigeon houses with decorated façades are cut high into the slopes, and the Direkli Church stands at the valley exit.

Zelve began as a Byzantine settlement — its churches date to the 500s, and half of the few 6th-century churches in Cappadocia are concentrated here. After Byzantine times it became a Turkish village, and its inhabitants enlarged the carved spaces and cut a rock mosque, which is rare. People lived here until the middle of the twentieth century, when the valley was emptied and turned into an open-air museum.

One of the oldest settlements in Cappadocia, on the Göreme–Avanos road, about 5 km from Avanos and 2 km from Göreme. The village name appears in records as Çavuşini in 1522.

The Church of St John the Baptist stands on the high slope at the entrance to the village and is described as the oldest church in the region, probably built in the 5th century. Its courtyard is unusually spacious for Cappadocia, and both it and the church have been damaged by rockfalls.

Note that this is a different building from the church usually ticketed as "Çavuşin Church", which was built in 964–965 and carries portraits of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros Phokas and his wife Theophano. Most travel sites merge the two.

The old village was lived in entirely in rock-cut houses until the 1960s, when erosion and collapses led to the residents moving to New Çavuşin.

Avanos sits on the Kızılırmak, 18 km north of Nevşehir. Its Byzantine name was Venessa.

The Kızılırmak is the longest river that both rises in Türkiye and reaches the sea within it — roughly 1,355 km, from Kızıldağ in Sivas province to Bafra Cape on the Black Sea. It has been cutting this valley for a very long time: the terraces near Avanos and Gülşehir record seventeen levels, the oldest more than 2.7 million years old, and the river has incised about 160 metres in the last two million years.

That river is why the town exists as it does. It carries red clay, and Avanos has been making pottery from it without interruption since the Hittites — the District Governorship's own words. The clay is gathered from the riverbed and from the foothills around the town, thrown on a foot-powered wheel, and fired from 800 up to 1,200 degrees. A basic shape takes four or five minutes on the wheel; the finishing and decoration take several days.

Watching it done is the thing to do here, and most workshops will let you try the wheel.

Two are open to visitors, both south of Nevşehir on the road to Niğde.

Derinkuyu is the deeper one, about 30 km from Nevşehir. Eight levels are open, reaching 50 metres, and it is estimated the full depth would reach 85 metres if every level were cleared. It takes its name from its wells — 52 of them, at 60 to 70 metres. The city could be sealed from the inside with large round stone doors. It was rediscovered by chance in 1963.

Kaymaklı is about 19–20 km from Nevşehir and is accepted as the widest of the explored underground cities. Four levels have been unearthed; its passages are lower, narrower and steeper than Derinkuyu's. The first level held stables, the second a single-nave church with two apses, and the third the storage rooms, wineries and kitchens — including an andesite block with 57 holes cut into it for grinding.

How many people either city sheltered is genuinely disputed: official Turkish sources give figures for Derinkuyu ranging from a few thousand to fifty thousand. Treat any single number you read elsewhere with caution.

Ürgüp is the largest town on the eastern side, with Temenni Hill rising about 80 metres above its centre and the Three Beauties — the region's most photographed fairy chimneys — 1.7 km west on the Ortahisar road. It is also the centre of Cappadocia's vineyards; the native white grape, Emir, grows on these high volcanic plateaus and commercially nowhere else.

Mustafapaşa, 5 km beyond Ürgüp, was the Greek village of Sinasos until the 1924 population exchange. Around 700 stone mansions remain, 93 of them a century or more old, along with some thirty churches and chapels. The carved stone façades are the reason to go. In 2021 it was named one of the UN World Tourism Organization's Best Tourism Villages.

Cappadocia's balloons fly all year, but the number of days actually flown varies. Spring and autumn are the most reliable, summer is usually calm enough, and in winter fog, frost and shifting winds push the cancellation rate up sharply.

Flights lift off from the valleys around Göreme before sunrise and can drift towards Avanos depending on the wind. Whether a flight goes ahead is decided by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, not the operator, and on an official weather cancellation the established practice is a full refund or a free reschedule.

Spring (April–June) and autumn (September–October) are the comfortable seasons: mild days, cold mornings for the balloons, and the vineyards in leaf or in harvest.

Summer is hot and dry, which is the argument for the underground cities and the museums in the middle of the day.

Winter is cold and sometimes snowy, and the rock landscape under snow is the version most visitors never see.

Cappadocia is walked. Up to Uçhisar Castle, down Pigeon Valley, through Zelve's three valleys, into Kaymaklı and back out — by the evening you have covered a lot of stone and carried a good deal of dust.

Alaaddin Hamam is in Avanos, a short drive from Göreme, Ürgüp, Uçhisar and Ortahisar, and it has been doing the same job for a very long time. The ritual is the old one: heated marble, the scrub, the foam, and tea afterwards. Complimentary round-trip transfer is included with every package; Basic requires at least two guests, and the pickup area must be confirmed in advance.