ALL I NEED IS MY PASSPORT

September 29, 2016

The Keslik Monastery sits just on the outskirts of Taşkinpasa. The Monastery held about 250 people and had two cave churches. The first one is Archangelos church and the other one Saint Stefanos church.

There are wonderful frescoes in the Archangelos church, but they are so badly covered with soot that you need the resident guide and his flashlight to see them.

Due to many robbers and military conflicts in the region, the monks had a safe room and when they were in need, they could close the door by a big and heavy millstone and escape in a tunnel under the monastery and garden. As these stones are hard to find, this is an excellent chance to see one in-situ.

Not far from Taşkinpasa is Sobessos, the only late-Roman/early-Byzantine settlement in Cappadocia. Originally a Roman settlement from the 4th century to 5th century A.D., it was discovered by chance in 1963 by a farmer clearing a field.

He reported his discovery to the local museum, but they ignored him. It was not until 2002 that the museum took action and started excavations that are still going on.

A corrugated-iron roof protects the 4000 square foot meeting hall, the main attraction of which is the mosaic flooring. In a later time a chapel had been built on top of some of the finer mosaics inside the meeting hall. According to the coin that was found during the excavation, the chapel dates back to the middle of the 6th century.

A grave was found in the north part of the main room and belongs to the same period as the chapel.

Further excavation uncovered the bath complex that you find at the entry, as well as an apoditorium (dressing room) and  a caldorium (steam room).

Wandering the ruins makes you realize how little is understood, or known about the development of Cappadocia. It is known that Christians were hiding out from Roman soldiers, but there has never been any evidence of a full-scale Roman settlement in the area. One leaves this site with more questions than answers.

Our last stop of the day was Mustafapaşa. It is difficult to discuss Mustafapasha without at least touching on the horrendous political policies taken on by the Turkish government at the beginning of the Republic’s formation.

The former name of Mustafapaşa during the Ottoman Empire era was Sinasos. It had a mixed population. Greeks and Karamanlides (Turkish speaking Christians) constituted the majority of the population and Muslim Turks constituted the rest. The small town had many elaborate houses built by the wealth coming from İstanbul.

This Greek portion of this town was devastated during the 1923 Population Exchange and the town has never economically recovered.

The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on January 30, 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved approximately 2 million people (around 1.3 million Anatolian (Turkish) Greeks and 500,000 Muslims in Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de fact denaturalized from their homelands.

By the end of 1922, the vast majority of native Asia Minor Greeks had fled the recent Greek genocide (1914–1922) and Greece’s later defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic genocide of the Christian Ottoman Greek population from its historic homeland in Anatolia (Turkey) during World War I and its aftermath (1914–22).

According to some calculations, around 900,000 Greeks had arrived in Greece. The population exchange was envisioned by Turkey as a way to formalize, and make permanent, the exodus of Greeks from Turkey, while initiating a new exodus of a smaller number of Muslims from Greece, to supply settlers for the newly depopulated regions of Turkey. Greece saw it as a way to supply its masses of new property-less Greek refugees from Turkey with lands to settle from the exchanged Muslims of Greece.

This major compulsory population exchange, or agreed mutual expulsion, was based not on language or ethnicity, but upon religious identity, and involved nearly all the Orthodox Christian citizens of Turkey, including its native Turkish-speaking Orthodox citizens, and most of the Muslim citizens of Greece, including its native Greek-speaking Muslim citizens.

More street scenes of Mustafapaşa:

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It is pumpkin harvest time in Turkey.  The Turks only raise the pumpkins for their seeds, the rest is set along the roads or tossed in the fields for animals, or, as far as I could see, simply tossed out.

Cappadocia and Central Anatolia are both so large and full of history and civilizations stacked upon each other, it is very hard to grasp a good picture of what actually took place when it history.  The area is a large farming area and the terrain takes your breath away each and every time you see it.

September 29, 2016

The Ihlara Valley sits near Mount Hasan and Mount Melendiz, two of the three volcanoes of Cappadocia.  The valley  is a canyon about 300 feet deep, and was formed by the Melendiz River.

Due the valley’s plentiful supply of water and hidden places, this was the first settlement of the first Christians escaping from Roman soldiers. It is believed that the valley housed more than four thousand dwellings and a hundred Byzantine period cave churches decorated with frescoes. Around eighty thousand people once lived in Ihlara Valley.

Of the one hundred churches only 10 are available to visit today.  We stopped in just a few to enjoy the frescoes.

The valley is 9 miles long, but it is set up for shorter walks, with tea houses interspersed for resting and just enjoying this stunning river walk.

The walk is peppered with lovely little wood bridges that cross back and forth across the river.

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*Along the way it appears that some people may still be living in the valley

There are 4 entrances to Ihlara valley. The first one is at the start of the valley in Ihlara Village. The second one starts about 2.5 miles up the valley and is the most popular with its 300 steps down to the valley. The third entrance is at Belisirma village, is easily accessible by car and is located in the middle of the valley.  The last is at the end of the valley near the Selime Church.

Our walk began at the 2nd entrance and we ended at Belisirma Valley.  The walk is truly beautiful, the park is very well maintained with trash bins everywhere and the evidence that someone sweeps the trail several times a day.

This, as most tourists areas around the world require an entrance fee.  I suggest you purchase an all Turkey Museum pass on your first day.  They sell for 45 TL and are good for 72 hours and as many entries as you can accomplish in that period of time.

September 29, 2016

Derinkuyu (Deep Well) is just one of many, many underground cities lying underneath Cappadocia. In fact they believe there are at least 36 underground cities in the area, only a few have been excavated.  It is really difficult to describe how claustrophobic the spaces are, how one has to stoop over for long distances to go through the tunnels, and more importantly how in the world anyone actually lived their entire lives like this.  You must also keep this in mind when looking at the pictures, they just can not capture what you are actually experiencing.

The caves may have initially been built by the Phrygians, in the 8th–7th centuries B.C.. When the Phrygian language died out in Roman times, replaced with its close relative, the Greek language, the inhabitants, now Christian, expanded their underground caverns adding the chapels and Greek inscriptions.

The city at Derinkuyu was fully formed in the Byzantine era, when it was heavily used as protection from Muslim Arabs during the Arab–Byzantine wars (780-1180).

Some artifacts discovered in these underground settlements belong to the Middle Byzantine Period, between the 5th and the 10th centuries A.D.

These cities continued to be used by the Christian natives as protection from the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century.

After the region fell to the Ottomans, the cities were used as refuges from the Turkish Muslim rulers. As late as the 20th century the locals, called Cappadocian Greeks, were still using the underground cities to escape periodic waves of Ottoman persecution.

When the Christian inhabitants of the region were expelled in 1923 in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey the tunnels were abandoned

Derinkuyu was rediscovered by a local person digging in their backyard in 1963, they were opened to visitors in 1969 and about half of the underground city is currently accessible to tourists.

It is thought that at least 20,000 people lived in Derinkuyu. It is at least eight levels deep, or about 200 feet. It is thought that there was a tunnel linking Derinkuyu to Kaymakli, which is over 6 miles away.

The area that visitors can see includes a stable, a wine press area, a large open area.  As you descend you come upon living quarters, what the state as a kitchen and a church.

The reason we chose this particular cave is that I was fascinated with the wheels that roll to block off tunnels in times of siege.