Things to do in Nevşehir

Nevsehir is the provincial capital of Cappadocia, a working town of roughly 130,000 at 1,224 metres. It has no cave-hotel quarter and no launch fields. Most visitors change transport here and drive on.

A town built to order

The place was a village called Muskara. One of its sons became grand vizier to Ahmed III. In the 1720s Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasa rebuilt all eighteen houses of it as a town.

His complex still holds the centre: mosque, medrese, library, bathhouse and a soup kitchen, put up in one campaign. The name he chose means new town. It has been the administrative one ever since.

The castle hill and what is under it

The castle stands on a basalt mesa above the roofs, Seljuk in its present form and rebuilt more than once. What matters is underneath. Clearance for a housing scheme in the 2010s opened Kayasehir, a rock town of tunnels, tombs and churches.

Parts of it opened in 2020. Excavation continues under the new blocks. Kaymakli, nineteen kilometres down the Nigde road, has eight levels and opens four of them.

Why people base here

Nevsehir earns its place on an itinerary through logistics rather than looks.

• Airport. Nevsehir Kapadokya is about 30 km northwest, with a handful of domestic flights a day.
• Coaches. The overnight buses from Istanbul arrive here, ten or eleven hours out of the city.
• Servis. Bus companies run a free minibus on to Goreme, Urgup and Avanos, at whatever hour the coach lands.
• Pickups. Red and green route minibuses collect from town hotels as a matter of course.
• Rooms. Ordinary hotels rather than cave suites, priced like the provincial town this is.

The trade-off is plain. You sleep cheaper and wake up twenty minutes from the valleys instead of inside them. Nobody photographs Nevsehir at dawn.

Practical

• Cold. At 1,224 metres winter is the real thing, and the town has recorded minus twenty-three.
• Heat. Summer afternoons run above 30C in dry air, and the temperature drops away fast after sunset.
• Underground cities. Low, narrow and steeply stepped, and no place for anyone who dislikes tight spaces.
• Balloons. They rise over the valleys and not over the town, so the pickup from here starts earlier.
• Getting out. Dolmus minibuses to Goreme, Urgup and Avanos run through the day from the coach station.
• Cards. Fine in town, patchy in the villages you drive to.
• Food. Testi kebab is the regional dish, cooked in a sealed clay pot that is cracked open at the table.