Cappadocia
The formation of Cappadocia, which is said to mean 'Land of Beautiful Horses' in Persian, goes back millions of years. The written history of Cappadocia begins with the Hittites. Cappadocia, which has hosted trade colonies throughout history and built a commercial and social bridge between countries, is also one of the important junctions of the Silk Road. Human settlement in the region dates back to the Paleolithic period, and it became one of the most important centers of Christianity in the periods after the Hittites, one of the greatest civilizations of Anatolia. Houses and churches carved into the rocks have turned the region into a huge shelter for Christians. Cappadocia region is the place where nature, history and art integrate most beautifully. While geographical events created the Fairy Chimneys, in the historical process, people carved houses and churches into these fairy chimneys and decorated them with frescoes, bringing the traces of thousands of years of civilization to the present day.
60 million years ago, in the 3rd geological period, the rise of the Taurus Mountains and the compression of the Anatolian Plateau in the north caused the activities of a series of volcanoes, Erciyes, Hasan Mountain and Güllü Mountain, which is located between the two, sprayed lava into the region. The ashes accumulated on the plateau formed a soft tuff layer, and the tuff layer was sometimes covered with a thin lava layer consisting of hard basalt. Basalt, which has eroded and cracked over time, seeped through the cracks of the stones and began to erode the soft tuff in the lower layer. With the warming and cooling air and winds joining this formation, cones with hats made of hard basalt rock began to form and they still continue to form today. These rocks with different and interesting shapes were given their name by the people who gave them a home: 'Fairy chimney'. Tuff plates without basalt cover turned into valleys due to the erosion they suffered. These valleys, where nature gave strange shapes, were later put to work by human hands, labor and emotion. It has been formed by the coexistence of humans and nature over a long period, from settlements dating back nine to ten thousand years, to churches carved into rocks by the first Christians, to large and safe underground cities; Cappadocia.
