All This Is That: Cappadocia's Goreme Open Air Museum, Churches, and Troglodyte dwellings

A fresco of Jesus in the black church - click to enlarge

A tufa tower with many dwellings. I could not figure out how they got to the higher caves. A local said there hand and footholds and the inhabitants climbed to their homes.

The most famous sight--and justifiably so--in Turkey's Cappadocia region are the thousands of cave dwellings and at least 400 churches built into rock caves. I won't go into the history of the Saints or the story of how Christianity took a foothold here, but it is a fascinating and moving story, particularly since Turkey is now virtually 100% Moslem.

The famous open air museum at Goreme is only about a mile walk from town. It's the second open air museum I've visited (the first was the Desert Museum in Tucscon, AZ). There were a lot of German and Japanese tour groups (including some amusing ones, like a Japanese tour group that all wore matching canvas vests). But we were mostly able to shoot ahead of them, skip some churches and dwellings and circle back later.

The caves are all pretty cool, but most amazing are the painted cave-churches. Medieval orthodox Christian monks (1000-1200 AD) carved the caves from the soft volcanic tufa and decorated them with elaborate Byzantine frescoes that were clearly painted by skilled artists. Some dwellings and churches did have outsider sort of art painted by troglodytes (a/ka/ cave dwellers), but almost all of that art was decorative and non-objective...like you see in Mosques.

The troglodyte habitations in Cappadocia were probably occupied since Hittite times, but Göreme is best known for these 1000 year-old churches.

Most of the frescoes in the churches have been pretty compromised—by wind, water, weather, earthquakes, and (I learned later tonight from a local friend) shepherd boys who used the faces of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the disciples figures as rock targets. These shepherds had been taught that images in church (even infidel churches) were sinful. Despite all of that, most of theart has survived...even many faces.

The best frescoes are in the Karanlik Kilise (Dark Church), where most of the paintings have been restored (and where I could not take pictures due to restrictions on flash). I think I mentioned earlier that some of the rock towers and dwellings were shot as backgrounds in the first Star War movie. It really is another world here...like something from Mars. Or Star Wars.