Waiting in the Kayseri bus station for our 9 pm overnight bus back to Istanbul, Cappadocia is gradually receding into dream memory status. Everything turned out to be easy and hassle-free, with just enough of the modern world to keep us in contact with our home base, but I don't remember seeing a TV in three days! There was certainly none in our room (and we didn`t have to pay extra for that convenience!), none in the restaurants; none in the fast food establishments. Note that fast food in Cappadocia consists of a man making a sandwich from scratch for you. Even in a more updated city like Kayseri, the national fast food chains offer healthy, tasty food for the Turkish pallette, e.g. chicken kabob on Turkish bread (no whole wheat...), with onions, cabbage, rice pilaf and an Italian pepper on the side. Water (Turk. "Su") must always be purchased. And the home-made jams were so good at our hotel in this country where dried fruit appears to have been invented, that I ate too much of it the first morning we were there, and developed the sniffles by the third day from the sugar.
So yesterday we visited the famous "underground cities." These were actually huge multi-story shelters for entire regional populations to keep them safe for up to six months from invaders. They went as deep as eight six-foot stories, with hewn-out cublicles for each family, communal rooms for each social class, water supplies, waste disposal, ventilation, and a church during Christian times. But the original underground cities go back 4000 years and more. The volcanic tuff (or tufa) is soft enough to carve into rather easily. In one of them there were two stories dug when the Christians arrived, and they added 4-5 more. They were sealed with 8-ton doors in the shape of a 6-foot diameter while, like a grind stone on its edge, which could be rolled on a track through a fitted slit in the rock, and which could not be budged from the outside. Lookouts gave news of the presence or departure of the invaders. The cities were even connected by tunnels 10 km long and more, rather dismal passages one had to negotiate in a crouched position the whole way.
Leaving the second underground city we headed for the gorge of Ihlara, a 14km long river gorge with 100-foot walls, into which are carved refuges, dwellings and small churches, some with elaborate frescoes. One is always in search of frescoes in these 6th to 9th century remnants of early Christianity. Unfortunately most of them out in the "wild," that is, unrestored and unprotected, are heavily defaced, with the grafitti of ages. It was a delightful hike through this magical gorge, and we turned around after 4 km. Then we jumped in our car and headed for the other end of the gorge, the town of Selime, that boased a "troglodyte village." This was a number of dwellings carved into the conical rocks, including a church with simple and mostly effaced linear frescoes, none of the polychrome storytelling we had seen at the Goreme Open-Air Museum the day before.
To be continued.
So yesterday we visited the famous "underground cities." These were actually huge multi-story shelters for entire regional populations to keep them safe for up to six months from invaders. They went as deep as eight six-foot stories, with hewn-out cublicles for each family, communal rooms for each social class, water supplies, waste disposal, ventilation, and a church during Christian times. But the original underground cities go back 4000 years and more. The volcanic tuff (or tufa) is soft enough to carve into rather easily. In one of them there were two stories dug when the Christians arrived, and they added 4-5 more. They were sealed with 8-ton doors in the shape of a 6-foot diameter while, like a grind stone on its edge, which could be rolled on a track through a fitted slit in the rock, and which could not be budged from the outside. Lookouts gave news of the presence or departure of the invaders. The cities were even connected by tunnels 10 km long and more, rather dismal passages one had to negotiate in a crouched position the whole way.
Leaving the second underground city we headed for the gorge of Ihlara, a 14km long river gorge with 100-foot walls, into which are carved refuges, dwellings and small churches, some with elaborate frescoes. One is always in search of frescoes in these 6th to 9th century remnants of early Christianity. Unfortunately most of them out in the "wild," that is, unrestored and unprotected, are heavily defaced, with the grafitti of ages. It was a delightful hike through this magical gorge, and we turned around after 4 km. Then we jumped in our car and headed for the other end of the gorge, the town of Selime, that boased a "troglodyte village." This was a number of dwellings carved into the conical rocks, including a church with simple and mostly effaced linear frescoes, none of the polychrome storytelling we had seen at the Goreme Open-Air Museum the day before.
To be continued.
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