Göreme

The valleys around Göreme were shaped by volcanoes. Ash from eruptions of Erciyes and its neighbours settled into a soft rock called tuff, which rain and wind cut into cones, ridges and cliffs, and which people found easy to hollow out. Rooms, stores, stables and pigeon houses have been carved here since antiquity, when the district lay in Cappadocia, a satrapy of the Persians and later a Roman province.

Christianity gave the place its monuments. From late Roman times monks and hermits settled in the rock; Basil of Caesarea, from nearby Kayseri, helped shape the monastic life that followed. Between roughly the 9th and 13th centuries communities cut chapels, refectories and whole monasteries into the cliffs and painted them with saints and gospel scenes, work that survives in the churches of the open-air museum. In Byzantine times the site held two adjacent villages, Korama and Matiana; the town was later known as Macan and Avcılar before taking its present name.

For centuries afterwards it was a farming village whose people lived in the same carved rooms, growing grapes, apricots and pumpkins, and keeping pigeons for their droppings to fertilise the vineyards. Some rock houses were abandoned as unsafe in the 20th century and families moved to new blocks. The area was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, and from the 1980s backpackers and then balloon operators arrived. Within a generation Göreme turned from a village into the main tourist base of Cappadocia, with the cave houses converted into hotels.

Göreme's culture is doubled: a village of a couple of thousand people and an international tourist town in the same streets. Families who farmed the valleys now run hotels, drive minibuses or crew balloons, and many of the businesses are still the same households under new names. Foreign residents, long-staying travellers and seasonal workers from other provinces add to the mix, and English is spoken in the centre while village Turkish is spoken in the lanes above it.

The rock itself is the local subject. People talk about which cones are stable, which caves flood, what may be carved and what may not, and how tourism should be limited inside a World Heritage Site — a live argument as hotels, viewpoints and quad-bike tracks spread. Pigeon houses, wine cellars and storerooms still in use are reminders that the caves were working buildings before they were rooms with a view.

The wider region brings other traditions close: Avanos potters throwing red clay from the Kızılırmak, carpet weaving and the Alevi and Bektashi shrine at Hacıbektaş to the north-west. Hospitality follows Anatolian form — tea first, business afterwards — and religious holidays still empty the streets of local families even at the height of the season.

Around two thousand people live in Göreme, and the number of visitors in a busy week can exceed that many times over. The permanent population is concentrated in the newer housing and the flatter parts of the village, while much of the old rock quarter has become accommodation. Nevşehir, the provincial capital about half an hour away, supplies the hospital, the offices and the big shops.

Work is tourism, almost entirely: hotels, restaurants, agencies, guides, drivers, balloon pilots and crews, horse and quad operators, and the trades that build and maintain cave rooms. Farming continues around the edges — vines, pumpkins grown for their seeds, apricots and potatoes — and some families keep both a business and a field. The year swings hard between a crowded season and a cold, quiet winter, when many staff leave and some hotels shut.

Daily life starts very early. Balloon crews and hotel staff are up well before dawn, breakfast runs late into the morning, the middle of the day is for tours and the valleys, and the centre fills again at night. Water supply, the strain of building inside a protected landscape, rising property prices and the concentration of the local economy in a single industry are the recurring concerns.

Cappadocia cooks slowly and simply. Testi kebabı is the dish visitors meet first: lamb or beef with vegetables sealed inside a clay pot, cooked for hours in an oven and broken open at the table. Beans, chickpeas and bulgur do much of the everyday work, in stews and pilafs, and dried apricots, walnuts and pekmez, a thick grape molasses, fill the store cupboard as they always have.

The surrounding towns supply the best-known specialities. Kayseri gives mantı, tiny dumplings under garlic yoghurt and red-pepper butter, along with pastırma, air-dried beef in a fenugreek crust, and spiced sucuk sausage. Flatbreads baked with minced meat or cheese come out of wood-fired ovens, and gözleme is folded over cheese or potato on a griddle. Breakfast is a long spread of cheeses, olives, tomato, cucumber, honey, clotted cream and eggs, often taken on a terrace above the valley.

Wine is an old local trade. The volcanic soil suits vines, the white Emir grape is grown widely in the district, and reds such as Kalecik Karası are made in Ürgüp, Uçhisar and Avanos; some cellars are cut into the rock. Pumpkin seeds, roasted and salted, are the regional snack, and the sweet course runs to syrup-soaked pastries, semolina helva and dried fruit.