Cappadocia: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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The rock here is ignimbrite — volcanic ash from Erciyes and Hasan Dağı that fell, welded into a soft stone, and was then capped in places by a harder basalt flow. Soft stone under a hard lid erodes into pillars, which is how fairy chimneys are made, and soft stone is also something a man with a pick can hollow out in a week. So everything in this walk is carved rather than built: churches, houses, stables, dovecotes. Two and a half hours, and the museum is the only part you pay for.

A short history of Cappadocia

The name Cappadocia already appears in Persian inscriptions from the 6th century BC, as the name of a province of the Achaemenid Empire. Before that the Hittites lived here. The strange formations in the landscape were created from volcanic ash that hardened and eroded over millions of years, and people carved houses, storerooms and temples into it. In AD 17 Cappadocia became a Roman province. From the 4th century Christian monks settled here and carved hundreds of churches decorated with frescoes. In the underground cities, such as Derinkuyu, which goes down to a depth of about 60 metres, thousands of people hid during raids. In 1985 the Göreme area was declared a World Heritage Site.

The ten best sights in Cappadocia

1
Göreme
The village everyone stays in, and almost all of it is carved rather than built
2
Göreme Open Air Museum
700 lira, Unesco since 1985, and go at opening before the tour groups
3
Dark Church
A separate 200-lira ticket inside the museum, and the colours are why
4
Tokalı Church
Across the road from the museum gate, included in the ticket, and most people miss it
5
El Nazar Church
A ten-minute walk down the valley, 100 lira, and usually empty
6
Aynalı Church
Off the Ürgüp road, free, and the facade has rows of carved niches
7
Göreme Panorama
The viewpoint above the village, free, and this is where the balloons are photographed
8
Sunset Point
A five-minute climb from the village, tea stalls at the top, and it fills an hour before
9
Uçhisar Castle
The highest point in Cappadocia, 100 lira, and the whole region is visible from it
10
Uçhisar
The quieter village to stay in, three kilometres up, and the view costs more

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What is an audio walk?

Tours in Cappadocia →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Cappadocia:

Free walking tours in Cappadocia

Göreme and the painted churches

Göreme village · The old name was Korama, and the valley was a monastic district rather than a town — the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea among them, organised Christian communal monasticism here, and the rule Basil wrote is still the basis of Eastern Orthodox monastic life. The houses you sleep in were cut by families who kept using them into the twentieth century.
Göreme Open Air Museum · About thirty rock-cut churches and chapels in one bowl, most of them from the tenth and eleventh centuries. The frescoes fall into two kinds and the difference is visible in a minute: the older ones are red ochre lines painted straight onto the rock — geometric, almost folk — and the later ones are full Byzantine figure painting on plaster, done by artists sent from Constantinople.
Dark Church · Its colours are the best preserved in Cappadocia for a reason that sounds like a joke: the church had almost no windows, it was used as a pigeon house for centuries, and the droppings sealed the frescoes from light and air. The restoration took fourteen years of scraping it off. It has a separate ticket because the air inside has to be managed.
Tokalı Church · The largest church in Göreme and it is outside the museum fence, across the road, included in the same ticket — which is why most visitors walk past it. The blue in its frescoes is lapis lazuli ground into pigment, imported from Afghanistan, and that single fact tells you the monastery had imperial money behind it.
El Nazar Church · A free-standing cone with a church cut through it, ten minutes down the valley on a dirt track, and usually you are the only person there. It is the clearest demonstration of what the stone allows: the whole building — nave, dome, columns — is subtraction. Nothing was added, nothing was carried in, and there are no joints anywhere.
Sunset Point · Five minutes above the village, and what you see explains the whole balloon business: the valleys here are narrow and the wind near the ground moves in a different direction from the wind a few hundred metres up, so a pilot climbs or descends to choose a heading. That is why Cappadocia, and not somewhere flatter, became the busiest balloon site on earth.

The valleys and the villages

Three things shaped this landscape in order: two volcanoes laid down the ash, water cut the valleys into it, and people hollowed out whatever was left standing. The third part is still happening — new rooms are cut every year for hotels — and the second part is the hazard: tuff crumbles, which is why a whole village was evacuated in 1952 and another was emptied in the sixties. Four hours on foot, or a day with a car for the far villages.

Uçhisar Castle · The highest rock in Cappadocia and it is hollow — a honeycomb of rooms, tunnels and cisterns on many levels, used as a refuge rather than a fortress: there is no garrison architecture, only places to hide. Families lived inside it until the 1960s, when the authorities moved them out because the rock had been cut through too many times and was unsafe.
Pigeon Valley · The small square holes cut high in the cliffs are dovecotes, and they were farming infrastructure: pigeon droppings were the only fertiliser available in a region with no grazing animals to speak of, so vineyards depended on them. They were whitewashed around the entrance to attract birds, and some have painted patterns because a decorated dovecote drew more.
Paşabağ · The chimneys here have two and three caps on one stem, which happens where the basalt lid broke into separate blocks before the erosion finished. One of them has a hermitage cut into it on three levels, traditionally attributed to Simeon, a stylite who lived at the top — the valley’s other name is Monks Valley.
Zelve · Three valleys of carved houses that were lived in continuously from the ninth century until 1952, when the government evacuated everyone because the rock was collapsing. The residents were moved two kilometres away to a new village, and Zelve was left exactly as it was — kitchens, a mosque with a rock minaret, a mill, and the tunnels between the valleys.
Çavuşin · The village was abandoned in the 1960s after a rockfall, and the empty cliff of houses above the new village is the result — you can walk up into them. The basilica at the foot of the cliff is dedicated to John the Baptist and is one of the oldest in Cappadocia, fifth century, from before the carving style settled.
Mustafapaşa · This was Sinasos, a Greek Orthodox town, until the population exchange of 1924 moved its people to Greece and brought Muslims from Thessaloniki in their place. The merchants who left had made money in Constantinople and spent it on carved stone facades with their names and dates on them — which are still there, in Greek, on houses now occupied by other families.

Underground

There are more than two hundred underground settlements known in Cappadocia and a handful are open. They are not catacombs and not mines: they are towns, with stables at the top where the animals were kept, kitchens and wine presses below, and living quarters and chapels deeper down. The design question they answer is a siege — every level can be sealed from the inside with a stone wheel that cannot be moved from outside. Not for anyone claustrophobic, and the tunnels are low.

Derinkuyu · Eight levels and eighty-five metres deep, with room for several thousand people and their livestock, and it was found in 1963 when a man knocking through the back wall of his cellar opened into a tunnel. The ventilation is the real engineering: more than fifty shafts, the deepest going the full eighty-five metres, which is also where the drinking water was drawn from so it could not be poisoned from above.
Kaymaklı · Shallower than Derinkuyu but harder to walk, because the tunnels here slope and are lower — the villagers above still use the upper levels as storage, which is the thing to notice: this is not an archaeological site that was closed off, it is the bottom of a village that never stopped being used.
Özkonak · Found in 1972 by a farmer who could not understand where his irrigation water was disappearing to. It has something the famous two do not: narrow holes drilled through the ceilings above the blocking stones, so defenders could pour hot oil onto anyone trying to force a door. The man who found it was the site guard for the next thirty years.
Ortahisar · The rock castle is the landmark, but the industry underneath it is the point: the tuff cellars here hold a steady temperature of about eight degrees all year, and for most of the twentieth century this village stored Turkey’s imported lemons and potatoes in them. Some cellars are still in use, and the village smells faintly of citrus in winter.
Ihlara Valley · A gorge fourteen kilometres long and about a hundred metres deep, cut by the Melendiz river through the same ash, with dozens of churches in its walls. The frescoes here look different from Göreme’s on purpose: this valley was close to the Arab frontier and out of imperial reach, so the painting is Syrian and Coptic in style rather than Constantinopolitan.
Selime Cathedral · The largest rock-cut structure in Cappadocia, at the far end of Ihlara — a monastery complex with a basilica, a kitchen with a chimney cut up through the rock, and stables big enough for a caravan, because this was a stop on the route and the monks ran it as one. The climb in is on worn rock with no handrail.

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Getting to Cappadocia and getting around

Kapadokya Airport · 30 kilometres out, flights from Istanbul only, and the shuttle is booked with your hotel
Kayseri Airport · 60 kilometres out, more flights and cheaper, and an hour by shuttle
Göreme bus station · Night buses from Istanbul take 11 hours and arrive at six in the morning
Nevşehir bus terminal · The regional hub; long-distance buses drop you here and a minibus finishes the trip
Nevşehir · The provincial capital, 13 kilometres away, and where the banks and hospital are

Cheap eats in Cappadocia

Central Anatolian food is not the Turkey of the coast: almost no fish, very little olive oil, and a lot of lamb, bulgur and yoghurt. Two things here are genuinely local. Testi kebabı is meat and vegetables sealed in a clay pot with dough, baked for hours and broken open at the table with a knife — the pot is single use and the breaking is the point. And the apricots, pumpkin seeds and dried fruit at the market are from the valleys you walked through. A plate of pot kebab is three to five hundred lira; everything else is under a hundred and fifty.

Fırın Express · Under 100 lira, from seven in the morning, and cash
Nazar Börek · Under 120 lira, and it sells out by two
Dibek · About 400 lira, phone three hours ahead, and shoes off
Topdeck · About 500 lira, eight tables in a cave, and booking is essential
Pumpkin · About 450 lira, one set menu a night, and the owner cooks it himself
Seten · About 600 lira, Ottoman recipes researched from manuscripts, and the terrace faces the valley
Bizim Ev · About 350 lira, in an Avanos stone house, and the mantı is handmade
Avanos market · Friday morning, and bring a jar for the pekmez

Museums in Cappadocia

There is no single big museum in Cappadocia; the sites are the museum. Three of them are ticketed open-air valleys, and the thing they document is a narrow window: between about 900 and 1100, when the Byzantine frontier was quiet enough for monasteries to be rich and for painters to be sent out from Constantinople. Everything before and after that is either Phrygian tunnels or empty villages.

Göreme Open Air Museum · 700 lira, two hours, and the Dark Church is a separate ticket
Zelve Open Air Museum · 400 lira, a village evacuated in 1952, a torch and flat shoes
Nevşehir Museum · 100 lira, an hour, and almost always empty
Güray Museum · 250 lira, a ceramics museum cut underground on purpose, and there is a workshop
Sarıhan Caravanserai · 150 lira, and the dervish ceremony is at nine in the evening
Gülşehir Karşı Church · 100 lira, and the Last Judgement here was under soot until 1995
Sobesos · Free, a Roman villa a farmer uncovered in 2002, and excavation is ongoing
Hacıbektaş · 150 lira, 41 kilometres out, and August is the pilgrimage

Nature and day trips near Cappadocia

The whole landscape is one geological event with three stages. Erciyes and Hasan Dağı erupted repeatedly from about ten million years ago and buried the plateau in ash up to a hundred metres deep; the ash welded into tuff, soft enough to cut with a spoon; and where a later basalt flow capped it, erosion left the capped columns standing while everything around them washed away. That is a fairy chimney, and there is no mystery in it. The season matters: July and August are over thirty-five degrees with no shade in the valleys, and January brings snow.

Rose and Red Valleys · Free, three hours, and start two hours before sunset
Pigeon Valley · Free, 45 minutes downhill from Uçhisar to Göreme, and the dovecotes are the point
Love Valley · Free, the tallest chimneys in the region at about 40 metres, and the track is sandy
Zemi Valley · Free, about two hours, and the stream crossings get your feet wet
Devrent Valley · Free, no churches and no houses — only shapes, and 20 minutes is enough
Mount Erciyes · 55 kilometres out, skiing December to March, and a car is needed
Ihlara Valley · 400 lira, 380 steps down, and the river keeps it cool in August
Sultan Marshes · 100 lira, 53 kilometres out, and April to September for the birds

Things to do in Cappadocia with kids

Balloon flight · From about 6,000 lira, takeoff before sunrise, and book the first morning
Pottery wheel in Avanos · About 300 lira a lesson, the wheel is kicked not motorised, and you keep the pot
Chez Galip hair museum · Free, a cellar with thousands of hair samples, and children find it funnier than adults
Uçhisar Castle · 100 lira, stairs and tunnels to climb, and hold small hands at the top
Devrent Valley shapes · Free, finding the camel is the game, and it takes 20 minutes
Özkonak Underground City · 100 lira, shorter and less crowded than Derinkuyu, and better for children
ATV in the valleys · About 1,200 lira for two hours, minimum age 16 to drive, and dust masks are given
Camel ride at Love Valley · About 500 lira for 20 minutes, agree the price first, and it is a short loop

Holy places in Cappadocia

Cappadocia matters to Christian history out of proportion to its size: the Cappadocian Fathers settled the doctrine of the Trinity here in the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea wrote the monastic rule still used in Eastern Orthodoxy, and the region stayed Greek Orthodox until 1924. Then the population exchange emptied it in a few months. What is left is the buildings, now in a Muslim region, with Alevi and Bektashi traditions as a third layer.

Dark Church · 200 lira extra, the best-preserved frescoes in Cappadocia, and no photography
Tokalı Church · Included in the museum ticket, across the road, and most people miss it
Çavuşin Basilica · Free, fifth century and dedicated to John the Baptist, and partly collapsed
Paşabağ hermitage · Free, three levels of ladders, and the top is narrow
Mustafapaşa · Free to walk, Greek inscriptions above the doors, and two church shells stand
Soğanlı Valley · 100 lira, 34 kilometres out, and a car is needed
Hacıbektaş · 150 lira, the Bektashi centre, and women and men pray together here
Kızıl Kilise · Free, 55 kilometres out, usually locked, and the view is the reason

Nightlife in Cappadocia

There is no nightlife in Cappadocia in the usual sense, and there is a structural reason: everyone is woken at four in the morning for a balloon, so the restaurants empty by eleven. What there is instead is wine. The region has grown grapes since the Hittites, the local white grape Emir grows nowhere else, and the cellars are cut into tuff, which holds a constant temperature without machinery. Göreme has a handful of terrace bars; Ürgüp has the wineries.

Turasan winery · A tasting is about 150 lira, in Ürgüp, and open till six
Kocabağ winery · About 200 lira, in Uçhisar, family-run since 1972, and the reds use Öküzgözü
Café Şafak · A beer is about 120 lira, on the main street, and it stays open latest in Göreme
Kelebek terrace · A glass of wine is about 250 lira, and the sunset slot fills
Sarıhan dervish ceremony · About 800 lira, at nine, it is a religious rite and not a show, and no applause
Ürgüp · The one town with real bars rather than hotel terraces, and taxis back cost about 400 lira
Göreme Panorama · Free, tea stalls, and the stars here are the real night attraction
Seten · The wine list is all Anatolian, about 600 lira a head, and last orders are at ten

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Frequently asked questions about Cappadocia

What is there to see in Cappadocia?

The top sights in Cappadocia are Göreme, Göreme Open Air Museum and Dark Church. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Cappadocia?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Cappadocia without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Cappadocia?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Cappadocia, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Göreme and the painted churches.

How do you get to Cappadocia and get around?

The main ways are Kapadokya Airport, Kayseri Airport and Göreme bus station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Cappadocia, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Cappadocia that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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