Cappadocia Classics

Seven routes, each with its own subject — painting, landscape, conservation, settlement, empire, deep time.

Each can be taken as a scheduled departure with other guests in the house, or privately. A guest staying five nights can take five of them and never see the same rock twice.

All seven are led by, or arranged with, people who work on these places rather than recite them.

The painted churches

Tokalı, Karanlık, Çarıklı — the finest surviving Byzantine wall painting in Anatolia, looked at as programme and as pigment: who paid for it, what it was meant to do, and what nine centuries and two restorations have done to it since.

Most visitors are given forty minutes. We take the morning.

Full day.

The Kızılırmak

The Kızılırmak — the Halys of the Greeks, the Marassantiya of the Hittites, the river that marked the eastern edge of the known world before Croesus crossed it.

A day following the water: the clay it carries and the potters who still use it, the crossings, and the villages that face the river rather than the valleys.

Full day, unhurried. Route to be confirmed.

Ihlara and Güzelyurt

Down into the Melendiz gorge, with rock churches cut into its walls, and out to Güzelyurt — the old Gelveri, where a Cappadocian Greek town survives almost intact, with its monastery valley and the church of Gregory of Nazianzus.

The finest walking in the region and its most complete Greek settlement, in one day.

Full day, moderate walking.

Keşlik to Soğanlı

South, through valleys almost nobody visits, to the monastery at Keşlik where the thirteenth-century paintings in the Church of St Michael the Archangel are under conservation — and on into Soğanlı.

You will see a working site: scaffolding, test cleanings, and the difference between what has been stabilised and what has not.

Full day. Subject to the mission calendar.

Açıksaray, Tatlarin, Ağzıkarahan

North and west, to the Cappadocia that is not churches. Açıksaray, where the rock is carved into courtyards and façades — not monasteries but the houses of people with means. Then Tatlarin, an underground settlement with painted rooms almost nobody visits. And Ağzıkarahan, a thirteenth-century Seljuk caravanserai still standing to its full height.

Full day. Domestic and commercial architecture, and the road.

Gümüşler and Tyana

South to Niğde, where the day moves between two empires. Tyana first: the Roman city at Kemerhisar, its aqueduct still crossing the fields, and the ghost of a metropolis that has largely gone back into agriculture. Then Gümüşler, a rock-cut monastery whose paintings survive in a condition almost nowhere else matches.

Long day. Best taken after the Hittite day.

Fraktin and Argeus

East into Kayseri province, and back three thousand years. At Fraktin, a relief cut into the rock above the Zamantı where Hattusili III and Queen Puduhepa make offerings to their gods. Then the mountain: Argaeus to the Greeks and Romans, sacred, snow-capped, and struck on the coinage of Caesarea for three centuries.

One landscape, worshipped twice, by two civilisations that never met.

Long day. The deep-time day.