Art And Culture in Nevşehir

The culture of Cappadocia is carved into stone, literally. Soft tuff allowed people to dig dwellings, chapels and whole monasteries straight into the rock, and the main collection of such architecture is the open-air museum at Göreme: several dozen churches of the tenth to twelfth centuries with frescoes laid on plaster. In the Dark Church the colours survived best precisely because there are almost no windows and the sun never reached them.

The Zelve valley shows the other side — not churches but daily life: a rock settlement where people lived until the middle of the twentieth century, until the stone began to crumble and the village was resettled. Passages, storerooms, mills and dovecotes remain there as they were left. The Red Tour usually joins Göreme and Zelve with Uçhisar castle and the viewpoints above the valleys.

The third layer is craft. In Avanos, pottery has been worked from the red clay of the Kızılırmak since Hittite times, and the workshops still use a kick wheel rather than an electric one. The Green Tour adds the Selime monastery, hollowed out of a single rock, and the churches of the Ihlara valley. Practical notes: the churches are dark and cool, flash photography is usually forbidden, and museum entry is paid separately from the tour.