20+ years ago I hitchhiked to Cappadocia in January with a light covering of snow on the ground. I went to an underground city. It was hard to find as the guard at the gate had left for lunch - no one was visiting at that time of year. At 6'3" it was claustrophobic and intense. Many tunnels have old wheels that they could roll across when intruders threatened. Above there are pots that apparently held boiling oil that was then poured. Seeing no one else down there I lived in fear of one of those wheels suddenly rolling across behind me as absurd as that sounds. It was a combination of factors but that day stuck in my mind forever. Hitchhiking out I got a lift in an oil truck with 2 guys with no teeth and loud music that wailed as we drove on a sunny cold day chain smoking in a cabin with rolled up windows all while laughing at our complete inability to understand each other.
It was strange to read your comment as I did almost the same thing. I was there in the fall/winter of 1993. I hitched around a bit as well, mostly on tractors because of the whole windows rolled up while smoking thing.
I remember the motto of the PTT (the Turkish telephone monopoly) was "A phone in every village!" They were nowhere near reaching that goal when I visited and it was normal to feel pretty cut off if you went to villages even slightly off the beaten track. It's an experience that's tougher to get nowadays, maybe even impossible in anything short of total wilderness.
I lived there for about a year. During that year I traveled to Rome to see a girl. She said "so the expression 'smoke like a Turk' is true!" Apparently it was an Italian expression and I was living proof of it. (I quit cold 'turkey' a couple of years later)
That sounds awesome. For anyone who hasn't visited Turkey or the Cappadocia region, I highly recommend it. Sure it's a tourist destination but it's not as popular as Istanbul and Antalya, and its vast open landscape leaves enough room for everyone to feel like you're on a different planet.
I'll add a +1 to that. Turkey is a fantastic country to visit. Istanbul is great, the small boat cruises between Fethiye and Olympos are memorable and Cappadocia is exceptional. My brother and I visited a few years ago and had one particularly brilliant day walking 35km and getting lost in the valleys of Cappadocia - will never forget it.
The hot air ballooning is stunning too.
Set aside two weeks to visit sometime, and make sure you do it. Can't wait to go back with my wife and kids.
It's trivial to carry on from Fethiye and into the Greek Islands if you want to link on from there into Greece, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Italy, etc.
My uncle is the owner of the first authentically-restored Cappadocian houses in the region[1]. It is now a cave hotel: literally a hotel built into a rocky mountainside.
I used to visit him every summer when I was a kid and traverse those underground cities, usually by myself. The experience is exactly as you describe: a feeling of awe ("people used to live here!") combined with claustrophobia and a fear of what would happen if there was suddenly a cave in. Not to mention the risk of getting lost in the endless tunnels.
There are also a couple of other noteworthy places: Uchisar Castle and Ihlara Valley, to name a few.
Like you say, the region isn't as popular as the more well-known spots in Turkey, but any time spent there is guaranteed to be a unique experience.
I was given a very brief, rushed tour of the underground city in Cappadoccia (one of them at least!) and one thing that I noticed was the people who made those caves really didn't have safety in mind. There was the occasional hole in the floor that had a pretty nasty drop underneath it! If I'd been on my own, I'd have been more scared of something happening to my flashlight, blundering into a hole, busting some bones, and being trapped!
"The underground city was discovered by a Turkey’s Housing Development Administration (TOKİ) urban transformation project. Some 1,500 buildings located in and around the Nevşehir fortress were demolished, and the underground city was discovered when the earthmoving to construct new buildings had begun.
Hasan Ünver, mayor of Nevşehir, said they were going to meet with the TOKİ head and make a plan regarding the underground city. "
It appears that the new one is not part of Derinkuyu, but a different site:
"Nevşehir Province is already home to Derinkuyu, an 18-story underground city that was once capable of housing around 20,000 people, but if early size estimates prove correct, the new site may be even bigger. Nevşehir mayor Hasan Ünver told the Hurriyet Daily News that the complex was so vast that other underground cities in the region would be the size of a “kitchen” if placed within it."
Nearby the underground city there is a complex of caves with christian frescos called Göreme. Some of them are pretty amazing, but almost all have been vandalized (up to a height that is easy to reach) in the last century since the population exchange with Greece.
I recognize his username to be Turkish, so he might be one of the locals. There are some people in Turkey who don't care much for history and the preservation of historical sites, and just want to make money off of demolishing them and building on top of them.
