Turkey's rocks of ages: 'Fairy chimneys,' tunnel cities of Cappadocia

Vicki Haddock, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, March 16, 2008

(03-16) 04:00 PDT Ayvali , Turkey -- Night descends on this desolate valley as the yatsi - the final Muslim prayer call from the muezzin - ricochets across the gorge.

A donkey brays, its hooves giving off a staccato clop-clop as it heads for home. Otherwise the village is serene except for the locals sharing a feast on a stone deck nearby, chattering away in what is, to our ears, indecipherable Turkish. The light casts eerie shadows upon holes in the cliff where villagers made their homes for thousands of years.

"I feel like we've landed on another planet. It's wonderful, but weird," my 14-year-old daughter Lesley says as she ventures a cautious sip from a tulip glass of cay tea. "Nothing here feels familiar."

At that moment, a Turk appears bearing a candlelit tray of sweets, setting it before a beaming boy as the local revelers burst into a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday."

To a first-time American visitor, this is the essence of Turkey's mid-region of Cappadocia: Just when it feels utterly alien, it flashes a Western streak that catches you by surprise. The East-meets-West dichotomy, on display throughout Turkey, is particularly evident here, in a spectacular region unlike any on Earth.

Like the troglodytes 4,000 years ago, our family of four sleeps that first night in a cave hollowed out from the soft tuff of volcanic rock. The Gamirasu Hotel, the only tourist accommodation in the rural village, offers 18 rooms in what was, a millennium ago, an isolated Byzantine monastic retreat.

But our cave dwellings are far from primitive. Under vaulted ceilings, the beds are lavished with rich fabrics and silk, the floors studded with spectacular woven carpets, the furniture itself carved from stone and strewn with kilims, the bathrooms bedecked in marble. The brainchild of local cousins Ibrahim Bastutan and Suleyman Cakir, the inn is miles away from Cappadocia's tourist-overrun towns of Goreme and Urgup.

The natural insulation in a cave of one's own is so thick that we sleep straight through the 5 a.m. sabah prayer call - in fact, by the time we awaken the summer sun already is shimmering like a doubloon across the valley. After a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, cheese, cucumbers, apricots and olives with fresh ekmek bread, we stroll the entire length of the town, pausing to watch old women in scarves, peasant blouses and colorful pantaloons bustling around the communal outdoor oven as their ancestors have done for centuries.

"Merhaba," we offer the only Turkish greeting we know. They return the favor with smiles and return to their work. I suppress an impulse to ask them to teach me to bake their bread, but am chagrinned to realize I have no knack for baking even when surrounded by a kitchen full of modern appliances. Besides, a private guide awaits to drive us across the apricot orchards and vineyards encircling Ayvali and into the heart of what lured us here - the geological freak show for which Cappadocia is universally famous.

Lunar landscape
"You must see Cappadocia - it will amaze you. I still remember visiting it on a - do you say 'field trip?' - when I was a girl," enthused my California neighbor Binnur Apaydin. Truth be told, when Binnur found out we were to visit her native Turkey, she recommended a dozen must-see spots: we reluctantly winnowed the list to Istanbul and Cappadocia.

"Surreal scenery. A lunar landscape. Fairy chimney fantasia," the guidebooks bubbled. Yet nothing prepared us for the sheer jaw-dropping spectacle of this otherworldly region, the size of the Bay Area, carved into the Anatolian plateau in Central Turkey.

The catalysts for this landscape were now-extinct volcanoes, particularly the largest, Erciyes Dagi, which looms on the horizon swathed in snow. Millions of years ago, these volcanoes spewed showers of tuff - ash that hardened into rock - across the plain and then topped it with a layer of harder rock.

Over the eons, water and wind slowly rubbed away the tuff, transforming it into columns towering as high as 130 feet, each capped by a dollop of basalt or other hard rock. When the necks of these columns grow too thin, their hard caps break off, leaving an eroding tuff cone behind.

To children, the fanciful figures resemble stone fields of gargantuan mushrooms. To adults, they are inescapably phallic. The Turks call them Peri Bacalari: fairy chimneys. And for centuries, they called them home.

As our eyes take in the Devrent Valley and Pasabag area, my brain can't resist concocting its own outlandish alliterations to describe the outlandish sight: tuff twisting and twirling itself into the tunnels and turrets of a topography positively Tolkienesque. It's as if Bilbo Baggins and his fellow hobbits built summer homes on Mars.

The utility of tuff is that it functions like concrete: soft enough to chisel with a spoon, but with the ability to dry into hard rock when exposed to air. (It is often confused swith tufa, a non-volcanic limestone that also can create odd towers, such as at Mono Lake.)

Ancient troglodytes dug out rooms that sheltered them from weather and invaders. Byzantine Christians carved out elaborate churches. Some Turkish families inhabit these caves even today, outfitting them with beautiful folk furnishings. And entrepreneurs have turned still others into luxurious hotel suites.

As we climb up rickety ladders to explore a honeycomb of abandoned habitats, I catch a lilt in the air and realize my 11-year-old younger daughter, Sierra, is singing something to herself: the theme from "The Flintstones."

I grin and ask if this is how Pebbles and Bam-Bam lived. "No," she says as if I am hopelessly clueless, "they didn't climb ladders to get to their front door."

"Well, they lived in houses," I agree. "This is more like a modern stone age family's condo." Indeed some surviving plateaus of tuff have enough holes to have accommodated an entire small city of cave dwellers.

We adapt a game we usually use for clouds or popcorn, and try to identify what each pinnacle looks like. Our guide, a hip Turkish woman clad in a T-shirt and snug cotton pants topped with a bright turquoise sun hat, lets us know that we are not the first to play, pointing out formations that resemble Snoopy and a camel.

Soon we encounter a real camel, no longer ridden by local caravaners but retained for entertainment value. Our family has eschewed the predictable tourists pilgrimages to hard-sell rug makers and whirling dervish shows, but we gladly pay the young son of the camel owner to give the girls this once-in-a-lifetime experience (worth it even though the camel make a serious attempt at biting them.)

Tuff doesn't just tower over us, of course, it also forms the valley floor upon which we trod. And it's just as easy to dig down as up.

The point becomes clear when we arrive at Kaymalki and our guide leads us to an inauspicious hole in the rock. We plunge into it and, like Alice following the White Rabbit, find ourselves in a subterranean world beyond our imagination.

Kaymalki is among the largest of Cappadocia's underground cities, of which about 100 have been identified. Historians believe the Hittites were the first to create them before the 12th century B.C., but by the 7th century A.D. thousands of Christians were scurrying into their cavities to elude Arab invaders.

Archaeologists have explored eight levels - of which five are open to claustrophobia-resistant visitors - and believe many more lie so deep that perusal would risk collapse.

Cappadocia underground
Crouching as we make our way single-file through the labyrinth passageways, we pass storage rooms, wells, stables, mills, baptisteries, sleeping cells, burial chambers and a room that a guide suggests functioned as an insane asylum. All of this is made possible by an elaborate ventilation system detectable only when we stumble across sudden shafts of sunlight.

"Imagine what it would have been like for invaders: They gallop into Kaymalki and find it utterly deserted. Every man, woman, child and animal vanished," our guide says. No trace of the fact that a thousand inhabitants were quietly cloistered in tunnels beneath them, sealed off by a millstone rolled into place, prepared to wait them out for days, weeks, months.

In fact, the inhabitants of Cappadocia have hidden from aggressors sporadically since the Assyrians established the first trade karums - trading posts - in 1900 B.. Next came the Hittites, Persians, Alexander the Great, the Romans and Byzantines, nomadic Selcuks, Mongols and Ottomans before secular modern Turkey emerged in the aftermath of World War I.

As each successive group has left its mark on the area, so too have the people left behind testaments to their struggles to survive. The most impressive of these lie in the Goreme Open Air Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We arrive late enough in the day to avoid the parades of summer tour groups, and stroll along the loop of rock-cut Christian churches dating from the time of the Byzantine emperors. Ducking into stone doorways, we are stunned at how they open into expansive stone sanctuaries decorated with paintings of the dragon-slayer St. George, and the crucifixion and ascension of Jesus.

The kaleidoscope of colors is sublime and vivid - deep blues, golds and a rich red realized by ochre pigments. It seems a miracle that these hues remain so bold 10 centuries later. Perhaps it is due to the fresco seco technique, in which color was applied to the plaster only after it dried. Perhaps it is due to the absence of damaging sunlight in the dark caves.

For us, the most memorable paintings in any of Cappadocia's 400-odd churches lie in Goreme's 11th century Karanlik Kilise, which translates as "Dark Church." We pay to illuminate the cross-domed church and stand in silent awe, transported back to an age when monks and locals gathered in this cave to worship. Minutes pass as we point out highlights to each other in hushed tones, none of us even questioning why we whisper.

Then, disoriented, we spill back into the daylight and begin our trek toward the town of Goreme. And once again, otherworldly Cappadocia startles us with flashes of familiarity. Here a row of ATM machines, there a Hertz car rental outpost, even a UFO museum with exhibits commencing with 14th century tapestries purportedly containing unidentified flying objects and even a hint of CIA conspiracies in Roswell, N.M.

Not to mention a restaurant bearing the slogan "Yabba Dabba Do!"

We are grateful to be returning to our cave of refuge at Gamarisu, where the night air is suffused only with the plucking strings of a long-necked lute called a saz as a local musician lulls tiny Ayvali to sleep. But I am awake late into the night, sipping cay beneath the canopy of stars, tracing the outline of the cave dwellings across the gorge.

I meditate on the words of the Sufi poet Rumi, having come across them in a Traveler's Tales anthology. A mystic who settled in Anatolia and founded the order of the whirling dervishes, Rumi's lines seem to capture the ethereal quality of ever-eroding Cappadocia and make me feel lucky for the chance to savor it:

I tell you truly

Everything you now see

Will vanish like a dream...

If you go
Prices are listed in U.S. dollars.

GETTING THERE
Most U.S. travelers come to the Cappadocia region via Istanbul, which offers car rentals and buses - more frequent and comfortable than trains. The trip takes about 10 hours. One-way bus fare is approximately $30 (ensure your ticket includes a transfer from Nevsihir on to your final destination in Cappadocia.) Turkish Airlines flies into Kayseri, about an hour east of the heart of Cappadocia, with regular shuttles to Goreme and Urgup. Round-trip coach air from San Francisco to Kayseri, with stopovers in Istanbul: about $1,500.

WHERE TO STAY
Hotel Gamirasu, in village of Ayvali about 6 miles south of Urgup, offers 18 rooms and suites built into the caves of an ancient monastery. Standard rooms about $100 per night, up to $530 a night for suite with fireplace, sauna and DVD player. Buffet breakfast included. Gamirasu restaurant serves a six-course Turkish dinner. Owners can arrange free one-way transportation from Kayseri airport. 011-90-384-341-7485, www.gamirasu.com.

For other hotel options in all price ranges: see www.cappadociahotels.com.

WHAT TO DO
Goreme Open Air Museum open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. April to October, closes two hours earlier the rest of the year. Admission: about $9. Additional fee of about $3 to illuminate the frescoes of the "Dark Church."

Kaymakli underground city open daily form 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. April to October, closes two hours earlier the rest of the year. Admission: about $9.

Hot air balloon: Kapadokya Balloons, Goreme Balloons and Sultan Balloons are among those offering one-hour trips for about $250 per person. Reservations: www.goremeballoons.com; www.sultanballoons.com; www.kapadokyaballoons.com

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Turkish Ministry of Tourism, www.tourismturkey.org.