Aya Kapadokya · Ürgüp
The Residency
Rooms kept for people working on this region.
The house was brought back from rubble over two years, and the people who did that work are the people who run it.
Since then it has kept rooms for others doing their own work in Cappadocia — conservators and archaeologists, doctoral researchers, artists, composers. Some stay a night between sites. Some stay a season.
It is not a programme the hotel sponsors. It is how the house has always been used.
There is no limit on field. Agriculture, geology, archaeology, history, art history, architecture, botany, philology, music, painting — the work needs to be serious and it needs to be here.
Books
For scholars and doctoral researchers.
Books
A desk that is yours for the length of the stay, long light, and most of the sites you have come for within half an hour. The house keeps a working collection on the region — architecture, wall painting, the Byzantine period, the agriculture and geology of the plateau.
For a doctoral researcher the practical offer is time: somewhere to be for weeks rather than nights, with the fieldwork at the door and no obligation on your evenings other than the ones you want.
Art
For painters, photographers, makers.
Art
The rooms here were carved rather than built, and the surfaces still carry the tool marks. There is space to work, floors that forgive, and a landscape that has been drawn badly by a great many people and well by a few.
Work made here may stay here, if you would like it to. The house keeps what residents leave, and hangs it.
Music Studio
For musicians and composers.
Music Studio
Rooms cut into rock have a decay time that no studio buys cheaply. One of them is kept for playing and recording, with the instruments the house owns and room for the ones you bring.
Musicians are asked, if they are willing, to play once during the stay — for whoever is in the house that evening. Nothing formal. It is the oldest thing that happens here.
Ephemera
What the others leave behind.
Ephemera
Field notes, photographs, recordings, drawings, the odd object — the residue of everyone who has worked from this house. It is kept, catalogued loosely, and shown to anyone who asks.
In time it will be the most interesting thing in the building.
What is asked in return
Residents are asked for one thing during the stay. Which one is yours to choose:
- An evening talk, a walk through the site, or an hour of playing — for whoever is in the house
- Permission for us to describe the project and the season’s work on our Field pages, with your director’s approval
- Photographs we may use alongside that account
Where a project is under embargo, we wait. Nothing is published without the project’s consent.
The house provides
A room, breakfast, and somewhere to work. Laundry, and the ability to handle field clothing. Space to leave equipment between working days.
Applying
Write with your project and your dates, and we will send you the application.
It asks for the work you have done before, any authorisation the work requires, and someone we may write to.