Cappadocia – a place long stood on a we need to go there! list. Fritzi’s and my expectations were far exceeded and we got blown away by the stunning surreal, landed-on-another-planet-like beauty of Cappadocia’s bizarre sandstone chimneys, spectacular rock formations and flowing valleys. The landscape appears like a painting gone wild.
It always seemed to me that Salvador Dali’s paintings are haunted by some kind of dark-side part of the surreal. But if you will ever get to Cappadocia, it is as though you landed in a landscape imagined by Dali, censored in such a way that all evil is outside the frame, far far away. We found a Cappadocia at peace, especially in the warm sunlight occasionally breaking through the cloudy sky, leaving us repeatedly stunned and thankful having had chance to see such a natural phenomena equaled by a matching vivid history.
So imagine something on the line of a rocky Shire, Middle-Earth. Well, sometimes, that far-far away evil comes so close that you and your civilization might need to escape inside the very already surreal environment, in order to survive, dwelling impressively vast underground cities. It only made sense, as until the threat, people inhabited the rocky sand-stone chimneys by carving cave houses inside them.
Fast forward some 10 centuries, and the surrealism we only got a definition for recently is the local reality, in a space hangovered from a fine mixture between the natural histories of entropy, greed and imagination.
What made Cappadocia even more fascinating for us is that people still live in some of the ancient dwellings, while small lively towns expand around the towering relics of their ancestors. People are friendly, people are open, and they invite you for a tea and a chat with a smile. One warm memory that stayed with us is the time when we were welcomed and showed around by an old man, who actually lived in a house carved inside a fairy chimney, near Göreme. He offered us tea and Turkish sweets and we talked about life.
Beyond that, it’s kind of redundant to even try and grasp in words how beautiful Cappadocia really is. Kayseri, Göreme, Uçhisar, Ortahisar and Pigeon Valley certainly left an impression on us, with glimpses of Mount Erciyes, the highest point in central Anatolia. So we let the pictures speak for our inability to describe Cappadocia. Magic cannot be explained!