A landscape in Göreme, Cappadocia, Turkey. Please note the man-made caves carved into the cliffs. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
The Citadel of Uçhisar, in Cappadocia (Wikimedia CC public domain)
A Cappadocian landscape (Wikimedia Commons)
Cappadocia — pronounced KA-pa-DOK-ya — is one of the strangest and most interesting places on Earth. I certainly hope that the current disorders in Turkey will calm down, so that tourists will feel completely comfortable going to that wonderful country again.
One of the favorite tourist activities in Cappadocia is taking an early morning balloon ride. This Wikimedia Commons photograph, by Nevit Dilmen, shows such balloons near Göreme, which is where we’ve done it.
A number of Cappadocian churches were literally carved into the rock cliffs of the region. This early-tenth-century fresco of the Crucifixion is fairly typical of their ornamentation. (Wikimedia Commons public domain)
In the meantime, please enjoy this roughly one-and-a-half-minute video about one of the area’s famous underground cities:
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