Nevsehir Tours
NEVSEHIR
Nevsehir is in Asia Minor and very
famous for the ''Peri Bacalan''
earth pillars. It leans against
Nevsehir Castle and was built in the
12th century by the Seljucks. In the
city there are Kursunlu Mosque
Ibrahim Pasha Monument and museum.
There are photographs belonging to
the Tulip era. Archaelogic works,
etnographic belongings near the city
are Avcilar, Kaymakli, Uchisar,
Balim Sultan Tomb and Haci Bektas
Veli Tomb (name of the founder of
the Bektasiorder of dervishes the
patron of the Janissary Corps). Nar
town which is nearly united with the
city is elegantly decorated with the
beauty of Cappadocia.
GULSEHIR
Gulsehir is on the bank of
Kizilrimak River and this is the
place where inscriptions were found
belonging to the Hittits. The Zeus
Tomb in Gokcetoprak near Gulsehir.
Also on the way to Nevsehir there
are the group of rocks formed into
an open palace, which has carefully
been carved into chapels, dining
rooms, monks rooms ranking from
bottom to the top. In the center of
Gulsehir there is the Karavezir
institution. Belonging to the
Ottomans, the institution Mosque,
Muslim theological school and
fountains can be seen.
AVANOS
Avanos was sat up on the bank of
River Kızılırmak and has several
tile workshops among the green part
of Nevsehir. There aren't many
historical remains here but tile
making and vine trading is very
important. The underground village
which hasn't been completely near
the yet, now is open to tourism.
Kızılırmak divides Avanos into two
parts and now there are several
motels and hotels on both sides.
ZELVE
This antique village in Cappadocia
was built in the rocks between two
valleys. After the earth quake in
1952 the village was evacuated.
There are two big churches which
have no wall paintings. The
surrounding of the village was
called monks valley. In this small
village there are united cones,
consisting of one or two heads. The
earth pillars here before completing
their development were spoiled.
There is also 3 cone-headed earth
pillars of monk simon who become a
Saint.
CAVUSIN
This town is a little for from
Goreme. The earthquake in 1950
caused great damage. Today the small
town is rebuilt among the rocks.
Important churches are Baptist Yahya
and Buyuk Guvercinlik Church which
were built in the name of the
Byzantine Empreror Nice for fokas.
There are also colored wall
paintings. Every year a wine
festival is held here. In this town
there are also some caves used for
preserving saving food. The tomb of
the Seljuk Sultan Kilic Arslan can
be seen in Urgup. Around Urgup,
Church Taar and Kervansaray are very
important places to see. Some wooden
houses are also typical Seljuk
architecture. In the valley Soganli
there is the domed church of St.
Barbara and Karabas built in the 9th
century.
UCHISAR
Uchisar is located between Nevsehir
and Urgup and was used as a castle
with stone houses by Byzantines and
Seljuks. These stone buildings are
full of churches and earth pillars.
Nowadays some of these places have
been turned into hotels for tourists
where wine runs from their
fountains.
GOREME
It is small town with a small
population among the earth pillars.
There are small town and churches on
the caves which were made before the
Christians. These are still being
repaired. Tokali church, Elmali
church, Yilanli church, St Azize
hurch are among the biggest ones.
The open museum is in Cappadocia. It
has remarkable wall painting.
MORE LIKE SCIENCE FICTION THAN
FAIRYLAND
In the heart of the central
Anatolian plain lies a triarigle of
land, roughly between the salt lake,
TUZ GOLU, and the towns of NIGDE and
KAYSERI, which has retained the name
of what was once an extensive
kingdom Cappadocia. Beyond KAYSERI
stands the mighty ERCIYES DAG, the
third tallest mountain in Turkey
nearly four thousand meters high.
Massive eruptions of the volcano,
and of others in the region,
probably about ten million years
ago, have given the area a unique
and extraordinary geological
complexion. Torrents of lava covered
the surrouding land with a deposit
of volcanic matter that was
sometimes as much as 150 meters
thick. Some of this hardened with
time, but other layers, consisting
of volcanic ashes clay and the like,
remained soft. Erosion by rain,
wind, streams and rivers found or
formed fissures in the top layer and
began to eat away at the levels
beneath. In this way was created an
extravagant landscape of weird and
wonderful shapes which are unique in
the world. The so-called 'fairy
chimneys' are the most striking
results of the ages, in which a
solid cap has protected a slender
column of softer stuff sauses from
the action of the weather. The
finest examples of these can be
found in PASABAG. Writers have
struggled to find words to describe
what they have seen here. ''A lunar
landscape'', they say yet it is
weirderthan that. ''A land from a
fairy tale or a dream'' they write,
yet it is not fairies that one might
expect to see creeping out at night
from the numberless chambers and
grottos, but something goblinesque
from the pages of J.R.R Tolkien or
Michael Moorcock, for these strange
pillars of rock, often topped by
peculiar mushrooms of stone, are
closer to the work of Sci-Fi artist
Roger Dean than to any of the
illustrators of fairy tales.
NATURE'S OWN CONCRETE
Inhabitants of the area long ago
learnt that the tufa provided a
perfect medium for the excavaion and
sculpting of dwellings, storehouses
and places of refuge. For the soft
tufa hardens on exposure to air. It
acts, in fact, like a sort of
natural concrete, without the
brother of mixing or building.
Hollow it or shape it as you wish
and without any grat effort. Leave
it and it hardens. Thus it has given
amateur architects and home builders
and farmers and chruch founders down
the ages limitless opportunities for
experiment and the place has become
honeycombed with cells, chapels and
even entire underground cities.
Geography and geology conspired to
produce this wonderland. For it
happened that the ancient kingdom of
Cappadocia was forever sandwiched
between hostile powers and lay on
the great east west highway through
Anatolia, so that it was continually
invaded and fought over and
threatened. The usual list of
conquerırs possessed it at one time
or another. Assyrians, Hittites,
Phrygians, Persians, the Greeks of
Alexander, the Romans, the Byzantine
Emperors, the Suljuks and the
Ottomans. So dwellers here have
often needed to make themselves
scarce. They have needed not only
homes, but refuges and the most
fantastic of these, perhaps of all
the man-made features of the region,
are the cities underground.
SUBTERANEAN REFUGES
There are said to be two hundred
underground cities in Cappadocia.
Most are small and unsafe, dark and
forgotten, but four of them are open
to visitors and provided with
electric light to varying depths. Of
these the most important are those
as KAYMAKLI and DERINKUYU. KAYMAKLI,
19 km. from Nevsehir on the Nigde
road, consists of nearly a hundread
tunnels, perhaps 30 kilometers of
them. The city is on eight levels,
four of which can now be visited.
There are living quarters
storehouses, kitchens and churches.
Vertical shafts provided fresh air
even to the lowest levels. It is
know that Christian communities used
these places to hide and shelter,
but the evidence points to much
earlier uses too.nGreek communities
before Christ and some archaeloists
suggest that the Hittites knew them
and may even have been the original
excavators. Underground passages are
found in other Hittite settlements.
Some of these underground cities
covered many square kilometers.
DERINKUYU, the largest of them all,
could have housed mostly 10.000
inhabitants. Acces from the ground
is by narrow passages closed from
below by ingenious pivoted doors
resembling mill wheels. There are 52
separate air shafts and the bottom
level of all 85 meters below the
surface of the ground, acted as a
water reservior. The chimney-like
rock formations around Cappadocia
are as remarkable as the fantastic
underground cities you'll find
there, dug during the 7 th century
as deep as 8 stories. In the event
of an enemy attack, it would have
been possible for the enire
population of the town, which was
built immediately above the
underground city, to disappear
without trace and to survive without
surfacing for an almost indefinite
lenght of time. What the historian
wauld give for a record of some of
these episodes. Squadrons of
horsemen bent on plunder and
slaughter wandering with puzzled
expressions around the deserted
township trying to work out what had
happened to everybody. ANd directly
below their feet, sitting in anxious
silence, heads turned upwards, an
entire population men, woman,
children, their animals, their
blankets, their stores, their lamps
and cendies and their prayers.
CHRISTIAN KNIGHTS AND MONASTIC
ARTISTS
It was a land of prayer and for the
most remarkable millenium of its
history these prayers were addressed
to a Christian God. In the fourth
century Bishop Basil of Caesarea
(now) Kayseri began encouraging
monks to leave the sinful cities and
to head for the purity arid
simplicity of the wilds. It was at
this time that Cappadocia first
became a center of monastic
Christianity and it was to remain so
for more than a thousand years until
the Ottoman conquest of the
fifteenth century. Although the
place must have attracted all
mankind, including austere
individuals seeking an ascetic
solitude, it is not comparable to
other monastic centers of the
orthadox world. Here the Christians
farmed with their families, the
white sail wasn't as unproduktive as
it looked. Where the water was
plentiful, the trees grew and the
grapes of the regipn were famous.
ANd with the farmers, soldiers came
as well. So the inhabitants had to
defend themselves. On the brightly
decorated walls of the three
thousand rock churches of
Cappadocia, the soldier is almost a
common a figure as the saint. The
frescoes in the churches display an
immense variety, from the simple
almost primitive bunches of grapes
in the Uzumlu Kilise in ZELVE to the
macabre portraits of naked woman
Winded by snakes in the so-called
Monster Church in the IHLARA valley
to the rich religious detail of the
crucifixion in the Karanlik Kilise
in GOREME. The dark chruch, before
the roof collapsed had a very tiny
opening and it is for this reason
that the colours of the frescoes
have kept their colours for
centuries. Goreme's Byzantine
churches, carved into cliffs the
hidden valley of Zelve and the
iyricate underground city of
Kaymakli eith it is wine cellars
stables and tombs. Even after the
Ottomans occupied the area and the
majority of Christians left the
area, some of them remained and
there was still a considerable
number of orthodox Greeks here when
the Turkish republic was founded in
1923.
UNDERGROUND CITIES
In cappadocia there are several
undergrouns cities. The rocks were
carved into houses Some of the well
known are Kaymakli, Ozkonak,
Derinkuyu, Orhantepe, Gumuskent,
Oraoren and Gokcetoprak. Especially
in Kaymakli these underground houses
have wine cellars, with ventilation
systems and rooms for keeping
animals. It is believed to have been
set up by the Hittits and later
enlarged by the Christians.
IHLARA VALLEY
Ihlara Valley is set up on the bank
of Melendis river and it runs along
for 10 km to the village of
Yesilyurt. In the valley there are
about 100 churches which were carved
out of rocks. These rock churches
were made in the 11th century but
few of them survived. These are
Egritas Church, Purenliseki Chruch,
Agacalti Chruch, Yilanli Chruch,
Bahattin Samanligi Church,
Kırkdamalti Chruch and Sumbullu
Chruch. It is enjoyable to see the
valley on foot but it is a little
tiring.
BOGAZKOY (HATTUSAS)
Bogazkoy is on a steep eock and many
foreign archelogists made
excavations in this town. Most of
buildings found in Bogazkoy in the
excavations belong to the Hittites
era. Ceramics pots, trinkets,
written eock tablets and objects
made of tones are exhibited in the
Bogazkoy Museum.
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Geographical Position
The surface area of Turkey is divided by the Dardanelles, the sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus. In the west, Turkey has boundaries with Greece (212km) and Bulgaria (269km). In the east and south east, Turkey has boundaries with four countries: The Soviet Union (610km) , Iran (454km), Iraq (331km), and Syria (870km). Geographically, Turkey is a land-bridge between Europe and Asia.
The european section of Turkey is a fertile hilly land. The Asian part of Turkey consist of an inner high plateau (1000m) with mountain ranges along the north and south coasts. The plaeau extends from the west to the Aegean coast, with many river valleys.
The western part is the most fertile section of the country. In eastern Turkey, the northern Pontus Mountains meet with the southern Taurus Mountains and from here the 1800m high Anatolian plateau. From this plateau rise the particularly high Vulkan Mountains over 3000m, while further south is the 5165m high Mount Ararat, the highest mountain in the country.
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