🇹🇷 Turkey · Central Anatolia and the Black Sea
Cappadocia is one of those places that look made up: a landscape of soft volcanic rock that erosion carved over millions of years into a forest of pinnacles, cones, columns and 'fairy chimneys', colourful valleys and canyons, all of it hollowed out by human hands into caves, dovecotes, churches and even entire cities dug underground. It sits in central Anatolia, it is a World Heritage Site, and it looks like nowhere else on the planet. Walking its valleys at sunset or looking out from a viewpoint is like stepping into a fairy tale.
But the image that made Cappadocia famous worldwide is the hot-air balloons: every morning, weather permitting, dozens and dozens of balloons rise at dawn and fill the sky with colour above the fairy chimneys. Flying in a balloon here is one of the most sought-after experiences in world travel, and watching them take off from a terrace (even if you do not fly) is just as magical. Add to that sleeping in a cave hotel, carved into the same rock, with today's comfort and the charm of a thousand years ago.
This guide gives you all the details to organise it well: how much a balloon flight costs and how to book it safely, which rock-cut churches and underground cities to see, which valleys to walk, where to stay, how to get around and which tours are worth taking. Cappadocia is history (it was a refuge for the first Christians, with Byzantine frescoes hidden in the rock), it is nature and it is one of the best travel experiences there is. A destination almost everyone puts on their list, and almost nobody forgets.
The landscape of Cappadocia was born millions of years ago, when eruptions of volcanoes such as Erciyes and Hasan covered the region with a soft rock (volcanic tuff) that rain, wind and rivers sculpted into the famous fairy chimneys. Humans took advantage of that easily dug rock from prehistoric times, carving out dwellings, dovecotes and shelters. In antiquity, Cappadocia was a kingdom of its own and then a Roman province; but its great moment came with early Christianity: between the 4th and 11th centuries, monks and Christian communities carved hundreds of churches, monasteries and chapels into the rock, many decorated with splendid Byzantine frescoes, and dug enormous multi-storey underground cities (such as Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı) in which to shelter from the Arab invasions. It was one of the cradles of Eastern Christian monasticism, home of the great Cappadocian Fathers. Later came the Seljuks and the Ottomans, and until the 20th century the region kept a shared life of Muslim Turks and Orthodox Greeks. All that history — volcanic, Roman, Christian and Byzantine — is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the Anatolian plateau: the land of Hittites and Phrygians, Atatürk's capital of Ankara, the Christian Cappadocia of the rock-cut churches, the Konya of the dervishes and Ottoman Safranbolu.
Read the history of Central Anatolia and the Black Sea →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before any civilisation, the history of Cappadocia is the history of its land. Millions of years ago, great volcanoes of central Anatolia — above all Erciyes, near Kayseri, and Hasan — erupted again and again, covering the whole region with thick layers of ash and lava. That ash compacted into a soft, porous rock called volcanic tuff, easy to carve but resistant, crowned in places by a layer of harder basalt.
Over millennia, rain, wind, ice and rivers eroded that soft rock unevenly: where a block of hard basalt sat on top, it protected the tuff below, and so the famous 'fairy chimneys' (peribacaları) were formed, those hundreds of pinnacles and cones topped with a hat of dark rock. Elsewhere, rolling coloured valleys, canyons and needles appeared. The result is one of the strangest and most beautiful landscapes on Earth, one that looks like another planet.
That same soft rock, so easy to dig, shaped the region's human history. From prehistoric times, people discovered they could carve dwellings, shelters, storerooms and dovecotes out of the tuff with simple tools, with the added advantage that the stone keeps a stable temperature, cool in summer and mild in winter. Cappadocia thus became a place where humans built not on the land but inside it. The Greeks called the region Katpatuka, a name some translate as 'land of beautiful horses', because it bred famous horses that were sent as tribute to the Persian kings.
In antiquity, Cappadocia was a land of passage and of mixture. It was under Hittite influence in the second millennium BC, and later formed part of the Persian Empire, which organised it as a satrapy and made use of its horses and its position on the routes east. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, an independent kingdom of Cappadocia emerged, ruled by a local dynasty of kings with names such as Ariarathes and Ariobarzanes, which knew how to manoeuvre between the great Hellenistic powers.
That kingdom ended up absorbed by Rome. In the year 17 AD, the emperor Tiberius turned Cappadocia into a Roman province, a strategic frontier region facing the Parthian Empire and later the Sasanian Persian one, with military garrisons and roads. Under Rome and then under the Byzantine Empire, the region remained agricultural and pastoral, with cities such as Caesarea of Cappadocia (today's Kayseri) as important centres.
It was in this late Roman and Byzantine period that Cappadocia entered history through the front door, not for its kings or its battles but for its role in Christianity. In the 4th century the region produced a group of brilliant theologians known as the Cappadocian Fathers — Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen — key figures in defining Christian doctrine and in organising monasticism. Basil, bishop of Caesarea, laid the foundations of communal monastic life in the East, and his ideas found the perfect setting in the cave landscape of Cappadocia.
Between the 4th and 11th centuries, Cappadocia became one of the great centres of Eastern Christianity. Following the example of Saint Basil, monks and hermits withdrew to the region's valleys and carved hundreds of cells, chapels, refectories, monasteries and churches out of the soft rock, forming whole communities devoted to prayer. The Göreme valley, today an Open Air Museum, was one of those great monastic complexes, with dozens of rock-cut churches carved side by side.
Many of those churches were decorated with Byzantine frescoes of great beauty, above all from the 10th century onward, when the iconoclast period ended (during which the Byzantine Church had banned images). On the stone walls and vaults, scenes from the life of Christ, the Virgin and the saints were painted in vivid colours which in some churches, such as the Dark Church at Göreme — protected from the light — remain astonishingly fresh a thousand years later. These paintings are a unique testimony to provincial Byzantine art and to the faith of those communities.
Meanwhile, underground, the rock of Cappadocia held another secret: the underground cities. Although some tunnels may go back to Phrygian times or earlier, it was above all the Christian communities of the Byzantine period that expanded enormous refuges dug tens of metres deep, such as Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, with ventilation shafts, water tanks, stables, chapels and great rolling stone doors. They served as hiding places during the Arab raids of the 7th to 10th centuries, when Muslim armies attacked the Byzantine frontier again and again. Thousands of people could live down there for weeks.
From the 11th century, after the battle of Manzikert (1071), the Seljuk Turks entered Anatolia and Cappadocia became part of the Turkish-Muslim world. Under the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, with its capital at nearby Konya, the region went through a period of prosperity: caravanserais (inns for merchant caravans) were built along the routes, such as the imposing Sarı Han near Avanos, along with madrasas and mosques. Seljuks and later Ottomans ruled a land where, even so, a significant Greek-speaking Christian population went on living.
That coexistence between Muslim Turks and Orthodox Greek Christians lasted for centuries. In villages such as Mustafapaşa (the old Sinasos), Ürgüp or Göreme, the two communities shared the territory, each with its churches or mosques, its festivals and its trades. The Cappadocian Christians went on using and sometimes enlarging the old rock-cut churches, and spoke a Greek dialect of their own. It was a mixed world, characteristic of Ottoman Anatolia.
That world ended abruptly in the 20th century. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Greco-Turkish war, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) imposed the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey: the Orthodox Christians of Cappadocia were sent to Greece, and Muslims from Greece arrived to occupy their houses. Villages such as Mustafapaşa still keep the beautiful stone mansions of those Greeks who left. The region was then inhabited only by Muslim Turkish people, who until a few decades ago went on living in many of the traditional cave dwellings.
For much of the 20th century, Cappadocia remained an agricultural and somewhat remote region, whose people in many cases lived in cave houses and grew vines, fruit and potatoes. International recognition came in 1985, when UNESCO declared Göreme National Park and the rock sites of Cappadocia a World Heritage Site, valuing both its extraordinary natural landscape and its rock-cut churches and underground cities. From then on, many cave dwellings were vacated for safety reasons, and some were converted, over time, into hotels.
The great tourism boom came in recent decades, and with it two images that travelled around the world: the cave hotels, which let you sleep inside the rock with every comfort, and above all the hot-air balloons. The sunrise balloon flights, which began modestly at the end of the 20th century, became the definitive postcard of Cappadocia: hundreds of colourful balloons floating over the fairy chimneys as the sun comes up. Today it is one of the most desired and photographed destinations on the planet, a must on social media and on travel lists.
That success also brings challenges: the pressure of mass tourism on a fragile landscape and heritage, the need to protect the churches with frescoes and to regulate the huge number of balloons and new buildings. The authorities try to balance conservation with the tourism the region lives on. But beyond the crowds, Cappadocia keeps its power to amaze intact: you only have to move a little away, walk a valley in silence at sunset or look out at dawn and see the sky fill with balloons to understand why this corner of Anatolia, sculpted by volcanoes and inhabited inside the rock for millennia, is one of the most magical places in the world.