The horses at Cemal Ranch are anything but wild and are well-looked after all year round.Ĭemal Koksal, born and raised in the nearby town of Ortahisar, is passionate about the business he established 15 years ago with his brother and horse-breeding father. In spring, they’d be rounded up and put to work again, but once tractors replaced them permanently, they were left to fend for themselves. Prior to the mechanization of agriculture, working horses on farms were turned loose in winter when the harvest was over, to roam at will. Cappadocia has long been referred to as the “land of wild horses” after free-roaming animals known as yılkı. While walking I become one with nature.”įor those that don’t want to walk, there are horse tours. Güngör loves what he does because guiding tourists through the valleys is more than a job, he says.
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He also does full moon night walks, hikes that give the best light for photographing the valleys, or ones suitable for hot days. With Güngör, hikers “will see churches and monasteries from the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries they won’t be able to find on their own.” On your own, if you’re lucky, you might spot a tortoise hiding under a bush or an eagle hovering in the sky. Güngör knows where to find them, along with wild asparagus, orchids and thyme. The dark blue or purple petals of these flowers, highlighted with pops of yellow, spring from narrow crevices. Cleansed of agricultural additives, the landscape has transformed with the reappearance of species of flora and fauna long thought to have vanished. Over the last 25 years he’s seen locals move from farming to tourism. Güngör’s been sharing knowledge about his favorite places ever since. “One day I met a couple (of tourists) and we walked with my dog for a few hours,” he says. One such guide is Mehmet Güngör who, since 1998, has run Walking Mehmet in the small town of Göreme where he still lives in a home partly carved out of rock. Having a Turkish speaking guide that knows who to ask for the key makes for a richer, more rewarding experience.
It’s possible to follow the track on your own, but many of the churches are either hard to find or locked. At Kızılçukur (Red Valley), the fairy chimneys are pinkish in color by day and take on a beautiful red hue at sunset due to iron ore in the tufa. There are several old churches along the way, the most famous being Üzümlü Kilise (Church of the Grapes). It meanders through orchards filled with apple and apricot trees and skirts fields of grapes, ripening on the vine. Hikers should head up through the village to the cemetery, where a track leads to Kızılçukur. Here, the huge Church of John the Baptist, dating from the fifth century, is the biggest cave church in the region. Several walks start from Çavuşin, a village once home to a mix of Turkish Muslims and Orthodox Christian Greeks known as Rum. It’s worth climbing the 300 steps to look inside. There are picnic spots or small restaurants on the banks of the river in Belisırma for lunch.Īt the point where the valley opens up, the imposing Selime Monastery, believed to date from the eight or ninth century BCE, comes into view.
Like anywhere in Cappadocia there are centuries-old churches decorated with murals. In early spring, bush nightingales warble love songs, flowers dance to the “oop oop” call of the ibibik or hoopoe bird, and the burble of water lulls you into a contemplative silence. The length of Ihlara Valley stretches along its banks, the location of a pleasant eight-mile hike beginning at Ihlara Village and ending at Selime Manastırı. The plains on the approach to Ihlara Vadısı seem no different, until you peer over the edge and see the tops of the lush green trees lining the Melendiz River below. In summer, much of Cappadocia appears arid and lifeless. Now Zelve is a model of a rock carved civilization preserved from early Christian times through to the modern Turkish Republic.Ĭlearly marked paths make Zelve easy to get around and give an idea of what you’re likely to come across elsewhere in the valleys. Like most of the inhabited caves in Cappadocia, spaces were re-used, re-carved and transformed. “Zelve was permanently occupied from the sixth century to the 20th century, which is something amazing,” says Tolga Uyar, a medieval art historian at nearby Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University. Here it’s possible to imagine what Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys looked like when Orthodox Christianity was at its height during the medieval Byzantine period.
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