We jumped on an overnight bus to Cappadocia. The buses here in Turkey have steward on board who serves free water, coffee and tea. The weird part is that they serve it in the middle of the night. During the late hours they run a loud annoying football game. The TV’s don’t get turned off until well into the morning. Even though the bus is empty we are not allowed to move seats since during stop at night they sometimes pick up more passengers. We arrive at the Cappadocia or specifically Goreme early in the morning. The first day is free for us explore.
Cappadocia is an inland part of Turkey has some old cave houses that have been in use as late as the early 90’s. These cave houses are networked by underground tunnels and are found scattered all over the valleys of Cappadocia.
This area is completely unprotected and we are free to explore over the entirety of the park unsupervised.
While exploring the networks of rooms carved into the earth we randomly ran into some friends of Casey and Jess. It was completely random and we ended up climbing and exploring the rest of the day with them. The rock valleys are sandstone and lot of it breaks off when climbing or just walking on it. It is amazing that all this is completely open and unprotected. Some of the rooms we find still have cave paintings in them. These paintings depict Christian icons. And since this area is now mostly Muslim the faces of saints are mostly scratched out.
The only remains of the large communities of houses are usually large room with door opening and windows. A lot of the times water has carved a room in half showing us a cross section view of the room. It seems that each house has a fireplace craved into one of the walls and recent soot shows that some people have still used it for burning timber. Some of the rooms contain a series of smaller nooks in a series. These were used to nest pigeons. Their dung was harvested for the curing of leather and hides.
There are tunnels that go underground and wind around the valley sometimes jumping above ground before dipping into the shadows again. The five of us are armed with two flash lights and blindly follow one another through these narrow passages. Sometimes there will be a section where the light shines in from a collapse and sometime the corridors deadend into a collapse. The entire experience was really exciting.
The second day we end joining the first of a two day organized tour of the area. We saw a lot of what we explored the previously. One of the stop was a city that was completely underground. The chambers were really small and the ceilings low. This underground city was used by Christians to hide from the Muslims. It was almost like exploring an ant hill. Christians must have been smaller back then because none of these rooms had ceilings high enough to stand in. Your backs are arched the entire time. That gets annoying really quick.
The rooms all still have the originally chisel marks on the walls. The consistency of the strikes and random nature of the markings almost makes it look like wallpaper. All the rooms are designed and created for a sole purpose. Like the modern day house each room has a different purpose. As for bathrooms they would dig a room, use it for a while and then collapse it. So there was a constant building and rebuilding process for this underground city. The most impressive view was from the top of one of the ventilation shafts. These shafts circulate warm and cool air. As you stick you head into the shaft to view below a shift breeze of cooled air rushes up from below. I couldn’t see the bottom of the shaft.
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