Historical Places in Turkey

The museum is a monastic valley rather than a building: about a dozen rock-cut chapels and refectories carved into soft volcanic tuff between the tenth and twelfth centuries, when this was a Byzantine monastic centre. The frescoes inside are the reason to come, and the Dark Church keeps the best preserved of them because centuries of rubble kept the light out. It sits inside the Goreme National Park and Rock Sites of Cappadocia, inscribed by UNESCO in 1985. Paths are short but uneven and the chapels are single file.

Kayakoy is a hillside of roofless stone houses above the Fethiye coast, empty since the 1923 population exchange between Turkey and Greece moved its Greek Orthodox residents out. Around 350 houses and two churches remain, built to face the light rather than each other, so the whole slope reads as one structure from below. An hour covers the lanes, longer if you follow the old footpath over the ridge to Afkule. Wear real shoes, because the cobbles are loose and there is almost no shade.

The fortress covers most of a rocky peninsula, its wall running roughly six and a half kilometres around the headland. Alaeddin Keykubad I of the Seljuks rebuilt it after taking the town in 1221, and the red brick Kizil Kule down at the harbour went up a few years later to guard the dockyard. Inside the walls are cisterns, a ruined Byzantine church and a small village that is still lived in. A cable car runs up from the beach, and the climb on foot is punishing in afternoon heat.

Sumela is built into a cliff face in the Altindere valley and looks from the road below like masonry growing out of the rock. Greek Orthodox monks held it for centuries until the 1923 exchange emptied it, and the rock church keeps frescoes on both its inner and outer walls. Restoration has run in phases since 2015 and individual sections open and close as work moves around the site, so check the current state before committing to the drive out from Trabzon.

Derinkuyu drops about 85 metres through eight levels, with stables and storerooms near the surface and a barrel vaulted room, thought to be a church, at the bottom. Round stone doors could be rolled across the passages from the inside only. A house wall collapsed in 1963 and revealed the scale of it, and it opened to visitors in 1969. It is named in the 1985 UNESCO inscription. The tunnels are low enough that you walk stooped for long stretches, on a single route in and out.

Kaymakli is the shallower of the two big Cappadocian underground cities and the tighter of them, because it spreads sideways instead of down: low sloping tunnels off a central ventilation shaft, with four of the levels open to visitors. Rooms give directly onto the passages rather than onto corridors, which is why it feels like a warren rather than a building. It shares the 1985 UNESCO inscription with Derinkuyu. Go early, and skip it if crowds in tight spaces bother you.

Three valleys of cave dwellings that people lived in until 1952, when rockfalls made the honeycombed cliffs unsafe and the village was moved down the road to Aktepe. That recent abandonment is what separates Zelve from Goreme: these are houses, a mosque and a mill rather than monastic chapels, and some still carry soot on the ceilings. A tunnel links the first and second valleys. The ground is loose scree in places and the marked route takes about ninety minutes.

A gorge roughly 14 kilometres long cut by the Melendiz river, walled by cliffs with rock-cut churches opening straight onto the path. The usual entrance is a staircase of more than 300 steps down from Ihlara village, and most walkers do the four kilometres to Belisirma and stop there for lunch. Agacalti and Yilanli hold the clearest painting. The valley floor is green and shaded, which makes this the one Cappadocian walk that works in high summer. Climbing back up the steps is the hard part.

Uchisar is the tallest rock in Cappadocia, a single outcrop tunnelled through with rooms, passages and pigeon holes, defensible because the defenders were inside the stone itself. Little of the interior is accessible now and the reason to climb is the view: on a clear morning you can pick out Erciyes, the volcano whose ash laid down all this tuff. The summit platform is exposed and the stairs are steep. It is a short walk up from Uchisar village rather than a day out.

Cut into the cliff above Fethiye in the fourth century BC, the main tomb copies a temple front: two Ionic columns, a pediment, and a false door carved to imitate timber panelling. A Greek inscription names Amyntas, son of Hermagios, which is very close to everything anyone knows about him. Smaller Lycian tombs are cut around it. Reaching it means a stiff climb of stepped lanes from town, and the light is best late in the day when the rock face turns orange.

An Ottoman village on the lower slopes of Uludag, roughly seven centuries old and still lived in, which is the whole point of it: the cobbled lanes and painted timber houses are not a reconstruction. UNESCO inscribed it in 2014 as part of Bursa and Cumalikizik, the Birth of the Ottoman Empire. Breakfast places have taken over several of the courtyards. It is half an hour from central Bursa and best on a weekday, when the lanes belong to residents again.