Cappadocia, Turkey: Geology Is Destiny

By Bill Heavey
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 11, 1998; Page E01

The driver of the car bearing us from the airport in Kayseri to the town of Urgup in central Turkey doesn't look like Keanu Reeves, but he grows anxious if his speed drops below 120 kilometers an hour, including when running the octagonal red "Gur" signs posted at intersections. He's concerned enough by an old woman obliviously crossing the street to swerve violently around her, but not enough to take his foot off the gas.

My wife, Jane, tightens her grip on my wrist and buries her face in my shoulder. "I can't look," she murmurs. A young English woman who is riding with us on her way to meet her Turkish boyfriend is happy to explain. "You must understand something," she says gaily. "To these people, everything has been preordained. It's all the will of Allah." The man speeds up to cut another car off at the Gur sign. Sure enough, right on the windshield behind the mirror is a little sticker that reads "Allah Korusun," Allah Protects. I look out the window at the fields of yellow squash. They are moving past us quickly.

Urgup is in the middle of Cappadocia, a 1,500-square-mile area bounded by the towns of Nevsehir, Kayseri and Nigde. In this place, geology is destiny. Thirty million years ago, a now-extinct volcano erupted, covering the area in ash. Over time, that ash became a layer of soft stone known as tufa, often overlaid with a layer of harder basalt. Wind and water have sculpted the rock into some of the eeriest formations on Earth: narrow valleys crammed with cones like giant sand castle drippings and "fairy chimneys" where the cones are topped with large caps of the basalt. There are formations that look like mushrooms or the knees of cypress trunks or huge ripples of soft ice cream. In some areas the rock turns pink under the influence of the setting sun. Fortresslike promontories push up out of the plains. Steep lunar ridges with natural caves in them make you feel as if you have landed in one of Mother Earth's stranger waking dreams.

The man-made stuff is nearly as curious. Much of it was created by the outlawed followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who began fleeing here in the 2nd century and carved small, defensible refuges high up in the rocks of hard-to-find valleys and gorges. They also dug monasteries and churches decorated with frescoes of Jesus and stories from the Bible. In the Goreme Valley (one translation of the name is "you cannot see here"), hundreds of small churches were built between the 6th and 9th centuries, including some of the most famous in Cappadocia. Even older and stranger are the 37 known underground cities, the largest of which are at Derinkuyu and Kaymakli. Some archaeologists believe the entrances to many others have been inadvertently sealed by farmers plowing their fields.

Derinkuyu is 30 stories deep and is thought to have been started before Christian times to shelter the inhabitants from the waves of invaders that have been sweeping over this bridge between Europe and Asia for thousands years. The Hittites, Phrygians, Medes, Persians, Romans, Seljuks and Ottomans all staked their claim to this land at various times. It was the Persian name, Katpatukya, land of beautiful horses, that stuck. There are still horses, mostly to carry tourists on trail rides. But they are outnumbered by the donkeys kept by small farmers.

On my first day in Urgup I am adopted by a trio of 10-year-old boys while hiking up to a big rock formation riddled with old dwellings and storage rooms above town. They are Hassan, Harun and Gorc (pronounced George), and the only English they speak is "hello" and "come on," which is all they need to appoint themselves as my official guides. They lead me up a path into the rocks and a succession of rooms, some of which have recently seen service as goat pens.

Gorc, their ringleader, fires an imaginary gun out the slit windows to demonstrate a fort, leans his head against his steepled hands to show sleeping areas, warms his hands by empty holes used for fires. In one cave with small trenches cut into the floor, he crosses his arms over his chest and closes his eyes to signify a child's tomb. In a small mosque with the roof caved in, he mounts the stairs in the front and pretends to speak into a microphone like the mullah. Hassan and Harun stick their thumbs in their ears and bow toward Mecca. The walls of the mosque are covered with graffiti: Gursel loves Nemura. Up on top of the rocks I sing them "The Star-Spangled Banner," and they sing the Turkish national anthem. Hassan sings with his eyes closed, milking the song for patriotic fervor. Harun sings in a shy, clear falsetto. Gorc tucks his chin into his chest and sings like a soldier. When I offer to buy them Cokes, they make faces as if Cokes are terrible things that make you sick. They want money, a million lira each, more than seven bucks per person for a 45-minute walk. I roll my eyes and give them a million to split three ways. Back in town I see them loading up on Cokes and candy. I pretend to be enraged, chasing them down the street and yelling, "Give me money!" They split up at an intersection and leave me standing there, panting, while an old man leading a donkey walks by without batting an eye.

The inhabitants of Cappadocia, like locals everywhere, took the area's natural beauty and archaeological significance for granted. It wasn't until a French priest, Guillaume de Jerphanion, published a book on his study of the churches in the 1930s and '40s, that the outside world took much notice. Hotels and bus tour operators have been active since the early 1980s, though Americans are a minor segment of the market. Tourism is widespread but not deeply rooted, which is to say that while sitting at an outdoor cafe eating stuffed grape leaves and chicken kebab, you can see one of the local rug merchants tool up to his store in a brand new Mercedes roadster followed closely by the mule-drawn wagon of a local farmer. A large number of Massey Ferguson tractors are in service. All of them are red. We never saw a tractor pulling a trailer that didn't have hand-painted scenes of sunrises or birds or flowers on its panels.

"I see we have Australians, Japanese, Italians, French and Americans on this bus, so from now I will speak in Turkish and you will pretend to understand," announces our guide, Cetin (Chet, to us). He is a strapping young Turk with an Australian accent, one lazy eye, and the manner of a big, goofy kid who has learned that you can't please everyone so you might as well enjoy yourself. He hits on all the unattached women and says "So, you are a housewife?" to those accompanied by men. When showing us caves that served as kitchens, he takes particular delight in pointing out places where grapes were crushed. "And what is it Christians love beyond all other things?" he asks rhetorically, sucking deeply on a cigarette. "Wine." He talks about churches that have been "restorated," the "collaption" of certain structures in the great earthquake of 1953 and says, "I'm sorry to have been waiting you" when the bus doesn't pull out on time. Walking next to him back to the bus, I ask what he did before becoming a tour guide. He shrugs. "I was an English teacher."

You enter the underground city at Derinkuyu through a dusty little parking lot and suddenly find yourself wandering through a semi-illuminated anthill for humans. Red arrows point you deeper, blue ones lead you back toward the surface. It's cool and dim in here, with surprisingly good ventilation considering that this is an underground Tower of Babel, swarming with tour groups. The air shafts and wells are half as deep as the Washington Monument. You shine a flashlight down, the beam disperses before you can see the bottom, and your head swims with a kind of inverted vertigo. At the bottom is a tunnel five miles long -- parts of which have suffered collaption -- leading to a second underground city, Kaymakli. Fifty-two chimney shafts, not unlike the capillaries in your lungs, served to disperse the telltale smoke from cooking fires so that an enemy scanning the horizon would see nothing. The city was used as recently as 1839, when locals hid out from the invading Egyptian army. There are granaries, stables, sleeping areas, kitchens, a chapel with a separate room for confession and a bunch of trap doors, pitfalls and other features to discourage uninvited guests.

As we go deeper, some of the tunnels narrow to single-person width and force you to stoop almost down to your knees. "Do you think the tunnels are small because the people were small?" asks Chet. "No, it's because it would make the soldiers come single file. They would have to leave some weapons behind. Would you have like to be that soldier? I think not." Cut into the sides are slots where six-foot millstones could be rolled into place just by kicking out a chock. There's a hole in the stone where you could launch an arrow or spear at the intruder. About this time I am seized by claustrophobia and an overactive imagining of what a life-or-death battle 150 feet below ground might feel like. Up top, the sun is so strong you have to shield your eyes until they adjust. The bus drivers, like nearly all Turkish men, are smoking Marlboros as if their health depends on it.

In the three small adjoining valleys at Zelve, honeycombed with churches, dwellings and dark tunnels, I keep expecting Charlton Heston to pop up in a loincloth with a spear and yell at me to take cover before the next attack sequence in "Planet of the Apes." As many as a thousand Christians are thought to have lived in the 300 rooms here between the 9th and 11th centuries. But there is also a mosque about the size of a two-car garage with a primitive minaret carved into the tufa here, evidence that, as in some other places, Christians and Muslims lived together peaceably for at least some of the time. (There were people making their homes here as late as the 1950s, when the government resettled them to a nearby town because of the deteriorated condition of the rock.) The frescoes here date from the Iconoclastic period in the 9th century, when it was thought that people had fallen in love with the pictures of Jesus rather than Jesus Himself. In reaction, artists turned to symbolic representations. The pious followers of Christ were depicted as fish, Jesus Himself by the vine, the palm symbolized eternal life, the peacock stood for the Resurrection, and so on.

Art historians consider the frescoes to be more significant than the places that house them, but in most places it's too dim to see them clearly. You're better off buying one of the slick catalogues for sale everywhere here if you want a really good look at the frescoes. (The other thing is that since the frescoes served as teaching aids, they can get a bit tedious. Outside one church at the concentration of buildings known as the Goreme Open Air Museum, the listing of illustrations inside ran to 47 subjects, everything from the Slaughter of the Innocents and the Adoration of the Magi to the Entry Into Jerusalem and the Transfiguration.)

For my money, scrambling through thousand-year-old rock town houses is the thing. We climb up through a dark tunnel. Chet disappears ahead with the flashlight, while those of us in the back light matches to bolster our courage in the blackness. We are climbing in utter darkness. When the tunnel finally levels out, there are side passages that lead toward the light. You hunch over and follow them out until one more step would send you off a 60-foot cliff. There is not even a strand of wire, only your own common sense to keep you from taking the plunge. "I think it's safer to walking back to the bus than jump," Chet says. He has come back to gather his flock.

That evening, the group goes to a winery, where a 15-year-old boy serves us the local white and red, where Chet drinks along with us. ("I'm not really a very good Muslim," he admits, exhaling smoke.) The one fellow on the bus who purports to know anything about wine takes a deep sniff of the white and says, "Mmm, loads of butterscotch!" Wines have been made in Cappadocia for thousands of years, just not particularly well. They taste pretty much like the wines I've had in Greece, only harsher. Somebody asks if the wine is aged in wood or in stainless steel tanks. The boy seems not to understand. We explain our question. At last he smiles in recognition. "In concrete," he says proudly.

A good way to see Cappadocia is to take two- or three-day bus tours to major sites offered by the many companies in every little town, then strike out on your own. In Goreme, another town that makes a good base of operations, we decide to splurge on a couple of nights at the Ataman Hotel. Some of the hotel's rooms were carved into the rock two centuries ago, right next to a couple of rock spires rising out of the hillside. The vaulted chambers have been outfitted with electric lights, minibars and large bathrooms (with tubs, a rarity in Turkey) and decorated with local carpets and kilims. It's a nice combination -- the slightly monastic feel of the bare stone but with comfortable beds and plenty of beer and wine in the fridge.

The next day, while browsing the offerings of Turtle Tours in the village, we pick up typed instructions for the Panorama Trek, a five-hour walk from Goreme up to the cone fortress in the scruffy little town of Uchisar, then down through the Love Valley and back to town. Supplied with two liters of water, we set off up a dry riverbed whose banks are planted with fruit trees, corn, melons and grapes. Everything prospers in this volcanic soil if it can get enough water. The day is sunny and warm, but the air is dry. The tourist sites in Cappadocia are merely where the rock dwellings are most densely clustered, but there are thousands of individual caves, and it's rare to find a view of any scale in which you don't see them, though the wooden ladders or stone steps cut in the rock are long gone. There are also thousands of smaller holes, which were made for doves and pigeons to use, pigeon guano being especially prized as fertilizer.

Our directions say to follow the riverbed through four short natural tunnels, then climb up the left side and cross over to a path that takes us up to Uchisar. Two hours into the hike, we've already run out of water. A woman playing with her infant son near the town tries to sell us apricots, tea and, finally, rum. We thank her but continue on, stopping at a cafe just short of the fortress. In the distance we can see the town of Avanos, famous since ancient times for its ceramics made from the clay of the Red River, which runs through the town. The waiter points out other towns to me that dot the landscape as if he had created them. We eat a plate of stuffed grape leaves, get two more bottles of water and go.

By 4 in the afternoon, we are following another riverbed, this one in the Love Valley, again out of water and hungry. We haven't seen anyone in two hours. All of a sudden there is someone calling to us, a tiny old man seated in the shade in his watermelon patch. He waves us over, smiling and laughing, and invites us to sit with a courteous sweep of his arm. He cuts us slices of melon with a big pocket knife with a curved blade and we eat smiling at each other. I do not know why this man is so happy. He is wearing a wool sweater vest, old corduroy pants and a snap brim hat in the summer heat with his shirt buttoned to the neck. His eyes are blue and watery. But he is delighted to see us, and as soon as we finish one slice of the warm, sweet melon he thrusts another upon us. The seeds are brown and fatter than the ones that come in American watermelons. We spit them in a pile between our legs. When we have finished, he scrapes a hole in the dirt with his foot and buries the rinds and seeds. He pulls out a bottle of water and dribbles some on our hands so we can wash. I do the same for him and we take his picture. He tries to invite us to his house nearby, making eating gestures, but we need to get back to town before sundown. There is something almost heartbreaking about his kindness.

Back in town, we're told that the plane from Kayseri back to Istanbul is full. The only way to get back is by the all-night bus, an 11-hour trip instead of a one-hour plane ride. On the other hand, there will be no death-defying cab ride to the airport. We have only an hour to pack our bags. I'm annoyed, but I think Jane is relieved. "You must understand something," she tells me solemnly. "It has been preordained. It is the will of Allah. Pack your bags, buddy."

Bill Heavey last wrote about Acapulco for the Travel section.

Details: Cappadocia

GETTING THERE: Many European-based airlines, such as Lufthansa and Swissair, offer connecting service to Istanbul from the Washington area. Turkish Airlines and Delta fly nonstop from New York; Turkish Airlines is quoting a round-trip fare of $900, which includes add-on service from Washington, a stay-over in Istanbul and connecting service to Kayseri. If you use another carrier to get to Istanbul, Turkish Airlines runs a daily flight from the domestic airport near Ataturk to Kayseri; the fare is $178 round trip. You'll probably have to spend a night in Istanbul before taking the plane to Kayseri, the nearest big town; a good bet is to take a cab (about $30) from Ataturk Airport to the maze of streets and midpriced small hotels near the Blue Mosque.

GETTING AROUND: Inter-city buses, run either by Turkish Airlines or private companies, are how Turks get around. They are cheap, clean and very comfortable. If you don't mind traveling all night or can't get an airplane ticket to Kayseri, you can take the bus from Istanbul to various towns in Cappadocia for about $20. Once you're in the country, you can also go to the bus station in your town and make reservations.

WHEN TO GO: Anytime from mid-May to mid-October is a good time to go. Some connoisseurs say winter is the best time to visit, when a light dusting of snow makes the rock formations even more magical. But it gets cold here. Winter high temperatures average about 40, and it can snow as late as May. We went in late August, the hottest time of the year, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Temperatures never hit 90 -- a cake walk by D.C. standards. And the air is clean and dry.

WHERE TO STAY: We liked the Hotel Uyan (Utanga Sokak 25, 011-90-212-516-4892) in Istanbul, where our room cost $65 double with bathroom. Another hotel in the same price range close to the Blue Mosque is the Ibrahim Pasa (Terzihane Sokak 5, 011-90-212-518-0394).There are plenty of good sidewalk cafes with the kitchens in front. Just window-shop until you find one that looks good.

In Urgup, we stayed at Hotel Janet (011-90-384-341-3305), which is clean, cheerful and serves the Turkish version of continental breakfast: bread, feta, olives, tomatoes, tea or instant coffee. A double ran $65. If you want something more luxurious, try the Perissia (011-90-384-341-2930), a four-star hotel with a pool, three indoor restaurants and a disco. Plan on spending $100 or so for a double. In Goreme, the Ataman Hotel (011-90-384-271-2310) is a splurge, but worth it. For $120, you get the room, breakfast buffet and dinner for two in one of the better kitchens in town.

TOURS: There are any number of tour companies in every town in Cappadocia and they all offer pretty much the same bus tours. Swallow your pride and go. They're fun and you'll see and learn much more than you ever would on your own. We booked ours in Istanbul at Batumlu Tourism (011-90-212-516-5170). You can do just as well in any town.

RUGS: You will find yourself unable to leave Turkey without buying a rug. No one is sure why this is. You would be well-advised to do some shopping here before you go for comparison's sake. You will find yourself nervous and hopelessly outclassed by salespeople who have the genes for it. Your only hope is to look uninterested in what you are most interested in, offer a third of the asking price and walk out. If nobody follows, you're on your way to establishing the true worth of your purchase.

INFORMATION: Turkish Government Tourism Office, 1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Suite 306, Washington, D.C. 20036, 202-429-9844, http://www.turkey.org.

-- Bill Heavey

© 1998 The Washington Post Company