Zelve Valley Tickets and Tours | GetExperience.com

Zelve is three valleys meeting at a point, and families lived in them without a break until 1952. Erosion had loosened the cliffs. The state moved the last of them two kilometres off to Aktepe, which everyone renamed Yeni Zelve.

That is the difference between this place and the painted sites. Nobody curated it. The residents walked out and left the rooms standing open.

What the rock kept

• The mosque. Cut into the third valley, with a carved mihrab and a small minaret resting on four columns.
• The mill. A grain mill in the cliff face with its stone still lying in place.
• The houses. Cut rooms with shelves, niches and chimneys, emptied of families within living memory.
• The tunnel. A low passage joins two valleys, and the state of the rock decides whether it is open.

Why there are no frescoes here

These chapels are older than the painted ones down the road. Their decoration is incised, not laid on plaster. Crosses, a fish and a deer are cut straight into the stone.

Christians and Muslims shared the valleys for generations. The Christian families left in the population exchange of 1924. The rest held on for another twenty-eight years, and Zelve opened as a museum in 1967.

Practical

• Not bought on its own. Zelve rides on the Red Tour, and one pass also opens Pasabag next door.
• Hands and feet. Ladders, cut steps and unfenced drops. The hardest walking of any open-air site in the region.
• A torch. Wanted in the tunnel and the deeper rooms, and a phone does the job badly.
• Numbers. Thinner than Goreme, because most minibuses allow the valleys forty minutes.
• Shade. None on the valley floor, and the rock throws the heat back at you.
• How long. An hour does the marked route, two if you climb into things.