Göreme National Park Turkey

Legendary

The parks unique landscape is best viewed from a hot air balloon.

Photo by Feridun F. Alkaya

Two volcanoes did the first half of the work here. Erciyes and Hasan erupted repeatedly over millions of years, burying this part of central Turkey under thick layers of soft ash that hardened into rock called tuff.

Wind and rain did the second half. They wore the soft rock away unevenly, leaving behind hundreds of tall stone cones with harder caps balanced on top.

People call them fairy chimneys. Some rise dozens of meters straight out of the valley floor.

The rock is soft enough to dig with hand tools, which changed everything. Around the 4th century, Christian communities began carving homes, chapels, and entire monasteries directly into the stone.

They kept going for the next nine hundred years. What grew here was an entire city carved inward instead of built upward, with living rooms, stables, storerooms, and churches all cut into cliffs and cones.

They also dug down. More than a hundred underground settlements exist in the region, and the largest, Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, drop multiple levels below the surface.

These weren't just cellars. Underground cities held wells, kitchens, ventilation shafts, and huge round stone doors that could be rolled shut from the inside during attacks.

Thousands of people could shelter down there. That mattered, because this region sat on the frontier between competing empires for centuries.

Inside the rock churches, painted frescoes still cover the walls and ceilings. Most date from the 10th to 13th centuries and are considered some of the finest Byzantine art anywhere in the world.

UNESCO named the park a World Heritage Site in 1985. It qualified on both natural and cultural grounds, which is unusual.

Visit the Göreme Open Air Museum to see the best-preserved rock churches and their frescoes up close. Go down into Derinkuyu or Kaymaklı, but skip it if tight spaces bother you. Take a hot air balloon ride at sunrise, when hundreds of balloons drift over the fairy chimneys at once.