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Cappadocia – April 2005

We left San Diego April 3 and arrived in Athens the next day – a long flight. As if to make up for it the Athenaeum Intercontinental upgraded us to a beautiful corner suite with terrace and view of the Acropolis. We stroll thru the Agora the next day and think of Plato and Aristotle walking thru the porticoed stoa. Our ship sails for Istanbul in the late afternoon. As we had visited Istanbul repeatedly we spend little time here except for another visit to the Topkapi Palace. We are anxious to see Cappadocia!

A Turkish Airlines flight takes us the following day from Kemal Atatürk Airport to Kayseri in the heart of the Anatolian plateau of Central Turkey. The area of Cappadocia has a kind of rhombic shape delineated by imaginary lines connecting the towns of Kayseri (Caesarea under the Romans), Kirsehir, Aksaray and Nigde. Anatolia – known since Roman times as Asia Minor – lies on a plateau averaging 4000 feet high with two snow-capped volcanoes rising to about 14,000 feet in the east and west. Millions of years ago these volcanoes flooded Cappadocia with torrents of lava. As the bus takes us from Kayseri to our hotel, darkness falls and we get our first glimpse of a strange and mysterious landscape: cone-shaped rock formations rising here and there out of the darkness up to perhaps 100-150 feet. Our hotel – the Cappadocia Cave Suites – is built into the rock, and some rooms and the dining room are accessible only by somewhat precarious steps hewn into the rock (however, the rooms have all the modern facilities). We can’t really appreciate it until the next morning when we see it all in daylight, and……. from the air because at 5 AM we get into the gondola of a hot-air balloon which takes us over a truly fantastic, unreal landscape. The air is still cold, but the sun is about to rise, and the balloon glides silently over the Göreme valley which is indeed a fairyland. Nature has wrought here strange rock formations indeed.Wind, rain and volcanic eruptions have created something of a moonscape that is difficult to describe. Many of the rock formations are conical, others are columns, some look like mushrooms, and some which are known as ‘fairy chimneys” are capped by basalt “hats” which, as erosion continues, will eventually fall off and leave the “chimney” itself unprotected so that it will in time collapse. Our balloon ride ends after about one hour. We are ready for breakfast back at the hotel in the cave which they call dining room..

But nature’s wonders are only part of Cappadocia. The man-made wonders of the area are even more amazing. Since thousands of years the area has been the crossroads of invaders. Hittites lived here in the 2 nd millennium B.C., then Phrygians, Lydians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Seljuk Turks and eventually the Ottoman Turks went thru Cappadocia, some to stay, others to pillage and plunder. From earliest times on people here sought refuge in the rock, carving out underground settlements, as well as churches and monasteries which date from the earliest Christians, with inconspicuous entrances easily overlooked by enemies. These rock churches go back to Byzantine times and the Arab invasions of the 7 th and 8 th century. As we enter one of them we are engulfed by a strange half-light. Our flashlights enable us to see the walls which are decorated with Byzantine representations of the Holy Virgin and saints looking down at us in faded hues of reds, blue, gold and ochre. People worshipped here, and later we are to see also where they lived.

The underground settlements, or “cities” as they are sometimes called, are the most remarkable sight of this strange land. There about forty of them, and more are being discovered. Some of them were inhabited by as many as 30,000 people at one time, and sometimes for many, many months. We penetrate into the one at Kaymakli, which is one of the largest. Though archaeological research points to the possibility that they, and particularly this one, may date from prehistoric times, it is generally accepted that they were, if not built by Christians, at any rate used by them to escape the invading Arab armies. Men, women, and children, with their livestock and most of the necessities of life lived down there. As we enter the Kaymakli cave we are startled, amazed, fascinated by the thought of what it must have been like to live down here. We grope our way thru narrow passages and tunnels that are barely large enough to let a human being pass thru. Tending a little to claustrophobia I am reluctant to follow the group. The guide is far ahead, and I am the last one of some twenty persons. I can’t go back. The path keeps descending, no steps, I don’t know how far down we are already. Suddenly I feel panicky. What if I lose the others and can’t get back? Ridiculous! Just follow that path, but as we face a really small tunnel I shrink back. No, not thru this one, I say to myself (envying those who had stayed above ground!), but then a well-endowed lady squeezes thru and I am embarrassed and follow her! Fortunately, this very narrow tunnel is “only” some 20 feet long and ends in a much larger room where I can stand up, and I heave a sigh of relief. This room was used as communal living quarters, with adjacent stable for cattle, a storage area for wheat and other foodstuffs, a water-well, and the all-important air shafts going up some 100 feet or more to the surface. A heavy millstone some 6 feet in diameter is there – it would be rolled in front of the access tunnel to stop intruders. Some of the tunnels can only be entered by crawling thru Indian-style! Fortunately we did not have to do that. How on earth – or rather under earth – could people endure life down here? Milking cows, baking bread, slaughtering pigs, cooking their food, pressing wine, having babies? How did they excavate the settlements and bring the earth and rock to the surface? How did they dispose of human and animal waste? And who built the first caves? Many questions remain unanswered to this day. It is hard to imagine how humans can exist down here for months on end, and yet – this is how they saved themselves from their merciless enemies. – “You must experience the atmosphere down there”, our guide had said. I am experiencing it! We make our way down to the eighth level, the last accessible level but there are deeper levels below which remain to be explored. We pass an air shaft, thank God, a little draft. Red arrows point the way down, blue arrows the way up, and there is the occasional electric bulb dangling from a wire. The ambiance is oppressive, and I am grateful to reach the surface and see daylight.

As mentioned earlier, it is unclear who first started building these underground cities. The Hittites, about 1400 BC, probably built some of them. Xenophon mentioned them in the Anabasis which means they must have existed in the 4th century B.C. After the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.) when Anatolia was divided in several small states Cappadocia became a independent kingdom which eventually fell under Roman rule. The Seljuk Turks used the underground settlements for defensive and storage purposes. There are even some long tunnels connecting some of the settlements with each other. We are told that as recent as 25 years ago some people who could not afford above-ground housing lived down there, but nowadays the areas are designated as archaeological zones by the Turkish authorities.

On the third day we must say good-bye to Cappadocia. On our long drive to Ankara we pass an old Caravanserai. These ancient way-stations were built to provide shelter, food, and protection to travelers and their camels from marauding bands.. Caravanserais are generally of square design and accessible thru a gate that is often decorated with intricate designs. Inside the courtyard where the caravans would arrive there was usually a small mosque or shrine surrounded by porticoes leading to rooms for the weary travelers. – Driving thru Anatolia we see the snow-capped peak of one of the volcanoes which was perhaps responsible for the moonscape of Cappadocia. Ankara where we spend the night at the excellent Ankara Hilton is a quite modern city which offers little in the way of oriental ambiance. We fly from there to Izmir (Smyrna) and then drive by way of Ephesus to the ship which is docked at Kusadasi which is a resort town that looks like it could be on the French Riviera. The ship sails the same day for Venice, and so our Turkish adventure comes to an end.

Frank and Roz Reinhard