SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT CAPPADOCIA

Cappadocia has 36 major and over 200 smaller underground cities but especially two of these underground cities are pretty popular with their impressive history. One of them is Derinkuyu Underground city. It is the largest underground city in the world with 4 kilometers of depth. Derinkuyu might have been built in 8-7th century by Christians who are running away from Roman Empire’s cruelty to use as a shelter. It had potential to approximately 20,000 of peoples to live in there with their livestock and food. The city has 1500 ventilation ducts that provided fresh air to the inhibitants of the city and these ventilation ducts are connected to a 55 meters deep vantilation shaft that had been used. Also, World’s oldest mental hospital had found in Derinkuyu.

DERINKUYU UNDERGROUND CITY

- The village Goreme’s name is given by the Christians who are hiding from the Arab invasion. “Goreme” means “you can’t see here” in Turkish.

-Cappadocia region has convenient soil for grape producing and that makes Cappadocia is one of the biggest wine producer in Turkey. There’s a number of wine testing shops where you can taste the wines. Also some of these wines have won international awards too.

-The Goreme open air museum is a well known religious complex that enlisted as UNESCO World heritage site in 1985.

-Cappadocia is a landscape formed by volcanic eruption that happened 3 or 4 millions of years ago. The name “Cappadocia” comes from a persian Word “katpaktukya” which means “ the land of beautiful horses”.

- There are nearly 600 churches has been discovered that carved from the soft rock. These churches date back to medieval times and has beautiful frescoes with amazing amount of colors and details. But unfortunately, some of these frescoes has their eyes scratched by old time locals who believed that they will get good luck with that stones.

GOREME OPEN AIR MUSEUM