Pamukkale

The springs made the place long before the village did. Hot water saturated with calcium carbonate has risen here for thousands of years, and as it cools and gives off carbon dioxide it leaves a white deposit that has built the terraces into a slope of travertine more than two kilometres long. The Greeks connected the springs with the god Apollo and with a Phrygian mother goddess, and a shrine stood above them before any city did.

Hierapolis was founded on the ridge in the 3rd century BC by the Seleucids, on the site of a Phrygian cult centre, was raised to city status by the Attalid kings of Pergamon, and passed to Rome in 133 BC with the rest of their kingdom. It grew wealthy as a spa and a wool-dyeing town, drawing the sick and the curious to its waters; earthquakes levelled it more than once, and the city visible today is largely the rebuilding that followed the disaster of 60 AD. A large Jewish community lived there, and a Christian one followed: tradition holds that the apostle Philip died at Hierapolis, and a martyrium was built on the hill in his honour. The city continued under Byzantine rule as a bishopric, came under Seljuk control in the 12th century, and the settlement that followed it was abandoned in the late 14th.

The modern village grew up below the slope only in recent generations, and its fortunes changed entirely with mass tourism. By the 1980s hotels had been built on top of the travertine itself, damaging both the ancient city and the formations. Hierapolis-Pamukkale was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, those buildings have since been removed, and the water is now managed by closing sections in turn so that the white deposit keeps forming. The village below has taken their place.

Pamukkale is a working village that has become a resort, and both halves are visible. Farming continues on the plain — cotton, vines, fruit and vegetables — while the streets nearest the terraces are given over to pensions, carpet and souvenir shops and restaurants with picture menus. Many families run the guesthouses themselves, and the hospitality is of the kind where the owner brings tea and sits down with it.

The wider culture is that of the Denizli countryside rather than the coast: a conservative Aegean province, more religious than İzmir and less used to foreign visitors than Bodrum, though decades of tourism have made English, German and Russian common in the village. Denizli is known nationally for the Denizli chicken, a breed of long-crowing rooster, and for textiles, which have employed the valley for centuries and were already the basis of Hierapolis's wealth when the city dyed wool in the mineral water.

Bathing has been the point of the place for two thousand years, and the etiquette of it is still local: the thermal pool among the fallen columns at Hierapolis, the red-tinged water at Karahayıt and the domestic spa hotels are visited by Turkish families for health as much as for pleasure, often for a course of several days. Foreign visitors, who mostly come for a few hours, see a different Pamukkale from the one its regulars know.

Only a few thousand people live in the village itself, in a district of the same name that reaches into the city of Denizli, where several hundred thousand people live on the plain below. The village population rises and falls with the season: almost every household is connected to tourism, and many take other work in Denizli's factories in winter, when hotels run at a fraction of capacity.

The valley economy is agricultural and industrial in equal measure. Denizli is one of Turkey's textile centres, exporting towels, bathrobes and home linen, and the plain grows cotton, grapes, figs and olives. Travertine and marble are quarried in the province and exported as stone, an industry that shares its name with the formations above the village. Thermal water supports a spa sector centred on Karahayıt that is largely domestic.

The day starts early for both farming and tour groups. Coaches arrive from the coast in the middle of the morning and again in the afternoon, and the village is at its quietest at dawn and after sunset, when the terraces hold the light. Water is the recurring local issue: the springs must be shared between the formations, the spa hotels and agriculture, and the terraces are managed by rotating the flow between sections so that the white deposit keeps forming. Traffic on the Denizli road and new building at the edge of the village are the other subjects of local argument.

The food is that of the inland Aegean: lighter and more vegetable-heavy than central Anatolia, built on olive oil, yoghurt and bread. Village restaurants serve mezes of aubergine, beans and wild greens dressed with lemon, gözleme — thin flatbread folded over cheese, potato or spinach and cooked on a griddle — and the standard grills of köfte and chicken. Pide, the boat-shaped flatbread baked with cheese, egg or minced meat, is the everyday hot meal.

In Denizli the kebab people go for is çöp şiş, thin skewers of charcoal-grilled lamb eaten with the local strained süzme yoghurt and often a glass of rakı. The province is also known for leblebi, dried chickpeas roasted until crisp and sold plain, salted or coated, and for its dried figs and sultanas from the Büyük Menderes valley below. Pekmez, a thick molasses boiled down from grape juice, is eaten with tahini for breakfast, and tarhana — dried fermented yoghurt, grain and vegetables — is made in summer to become winter soup.

Breakfast is the meal visitors remember: a spread of white cheese, olives, tomatoes, cucumber, honey with clotted kaymak, jams, eggs and endless small glasses of tea. Ayran, salted diluted yoghurt, accompanies grilled meat. The Çal district of Denizli gives its name to Çal Karası, an indigenous red grape of the inland Aegean, while grape juice, mulberry juice and Turkish coffee are the usual non-alcoholic choices.