Goreme and Urgup

About 90 kilometers southwest of Kayseri are the unusual towns of Ürgüp, Göreme, Avcılar, Ortahisar, and Üç Hisar with their troglodyte dwellings. Remains of early churches can be seen, complicated rooms hollowed out of the cones of volcanic ash.

Several hundred churches are in this area, some of which are decorated with scratched frescoes depicting scenes from the Bible or the Apocrypha. Many of them reflect both the architects’ familiarity with conventional Byzantine buildings and their own slavish dependence on that style: false columns and vaulting have been carved into the tuff although the rock was suitable to a more plastic form.

The intent then was to recall for the residents their associations with freestanding sanctuaries and the symbolism of the cross and the heavenly dome. For us today the columns that now hang and the arches that end in midair create also a sense of the fantastic and the lavish along with their witness to the ravages of time. The area was most highly populated during the eighth and ninth centuries though there were probably Christians living there from the first century on.

In the valley of the Melendiz Suyu between Aksaray and Ihlara there are more than twenty similar churches with paintings from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. One in Kokar Kilise, Ihlara, shows two shepherds playing instruments that look much like the ney (bamboo flute) used today in dervish religious music.