Göreme Open Air Museum Tickets and Tours | GetExperience.com

The Goreme Open Air Museum is a monastic valley rather than a building. Nobody built any of it. About a dozen chapels, a convent and a refectory were cut into one curve of cliff.

The community was at its largest between the tenth and the twelfth centuries. Patrons paid for the paintings. Several of them are named on the walls they bought.

Which chapels carry the paint

Five are worth knowing by name before you walk in.

• Elmali. The Apple Church, painted around 1050 under nine small domes.
• Azize Barbara. Late eleventh century, red ochre patterns drawn straight onto the rock beside the saints.
• Karanlik. The Dark Church, late eleventh into the twelfth, and the best kept of them.
• Yilanli. The Snake Church, with Saint Onuphrius and the emperor Constantine on the wall.
• Kizlar Manastiri. The convent, several floors of cells and a kitchen, joined by tunnels.

Why the Dark Church costs extra

Pigeons nested in it for centuries and their droppings sealed the plaster. Restorers spent fourteen years on the church. Most of that went on scraping the layer off.

The pigment underneath came out almost unfaded. A separate ticket and a camera ban hold the numbers inside down. Faces in the other chapels were scratched away later, and nobody agrees by whom.

Practical

• Tickets. Foreign visitors pay in euros at the gate, and the three-day regional pass covers the Dark Church too.
• Sun and snow. The bowl is a suntrap with no shade between chapels, and the steps hold ice into March.
• Two queues. One for the gate, one for the Dark Church, and the second is the slow one.
• How long. Ninety minutes is honest; two hours if you read the panels.
• Inside a tour. Red Tour listings that name the museum in the title normally carry the ticket. The others leave you to buy it.
• Underfoot. The loop climbs and drops on worn rock, with no handrail on most of it.