May 18 , 2014
Slept a bit late since our tour didn’t start until 10:00am. We had booked a guided tour through our travel agent called History & Adventure in Cappadoccia. Actually we had been considering taking three consecutive days of full day tours plus the balloon ride. Mustafa at the hotel recommended that we only take two tours and not on the same day as the balloon ride. That was very good advice. We saw a lot in those two days and had one unplanned day to rest a bit and explore the town of Goreme and visit the open air museum.
Our guide Fatih did a great job explaining the complex history on our tour and setting it in context of what we were visiting. We started out on a hike of Rose Valley – supposed to be 4 KM but I think our driver picked us up at around the 3 KM mark. The hike went through farms and gorges. On our walk through Rose Valley we saw very few other people even though it is a busy holiday weekend in Turkey (Monday being Youth Day and a national holiday).
The focus of our explorations was learning about the pigeon houses caved high up in the soft rock of the valley. The purpose of keeping pigeons was primarily to collect their droppings – for manure in farming and for the egg whites used in painting icons in the cave churches.
We scrambled up a steep slippery slope to see an early Christian cave church. At one point the guide is pulling and Bill is pushing from behind to get me up the slippery hill. The church was built in the 4th century and had no painted frescoes, just a simple apse and rudimentary red geometric designs. During the iconoclastic period many of the churches were decorated with these simple designs because painting of images was forbidden by the iconoclasts.
At the end of our hike we took a quick stop in the village of Cavusin, once an old Greek village before the Christian/Greek and Muslim/Turkish population exchange in 1924.
Next stop was a quick walk around Monk’s valley filled with many mushroom shaped fairy chimneys where St.Simon lived and was buried. This was later to become one of the first monastic communities started by St. Basil and Sts Gregorious who built simple monastery rooms into the caves of the soft rock.
All this before our lunch break – which was an open air lunch in a farm setting deep in the valley behind the village of Goreme. We rode on a jeep to get to the farm – which was built by the owners of our hotel as a place to take visitors for tour lunches and some breakfasts. The Turks are very enterprising – a group of savvy businessmen own several hotels, a travel agency and Butterfly Balloons.
Our lunch was fabulous – yogurt soup, pasta salad, green salad, stuffed eggplant and peppers, wine, bean soup and a local Goreme dessert called adine. All except the wine was included in the price of the tour.
Next stop was a tour of the underground city of Kaymakli. We went down 5 floors. All carved out by men since pre-Christian times. Cities were used for food storage, for warmth and to hide from persecutors (Romans for early Christians). I would not have liked to live like that.
This was a lovely tour and the best part of the day was a nap on the settee in front of the open windows in our room.
We had made a dinner reservation at Dibek – a family run restaurant known for its kebabs cooked in pottery for four hours. These had to be ordered in advance when reservations were made. We were served by the chef and young owner of the place. Had a simple menu and everything was delicious.
It was a lovely cool evening to stroll main street of Goreme after dinner. We did some shopping (stores still open at 10pm) for jewelry and almost got talked into a beautiful wall hanging from a carpet shop.
