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Cappadocia
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Cappadocia is a triangle
with three beautiful towns on its three points: Nevsehir, Urgup and Avanos. It
is the name of the ancient province in central Anatolia. The irresistible region
is created through violent eruptions of the volcanoes Mt. Erciyes (3,916 m.) and
Mt. Hasan (3,268 m.) three million years ago.
In the middle of this triangle
lies Goreme, the famous town with rock churches.
The river Kizilirmak, red
river in other words, the wind and the weather have eroded the soft volcanic rock
into hundreds and hundreds of strangely shaped pillars, cones and "fairy chimneys"
or isolated pinnacles.
The Taurus mountains, which
are technically part of the Alpine chain, in their creation 60 million years ago,
caused the warping of the Anatolian plateau. The resulting volcanoes, including
the spectacular Mount Erciyas and Mount Hasan, produced the tuff from which the
unique landscape of Cappadocia is formed.
 There
is no historical record of activity from these ancient volcanoes but there are
three surviving memorials, although it is likely that these were created by people
who had heard about the eruptions through folk history rather than having actually
witnessed it themselves. It took millions of years for the ash from these volcanoes
to form a layer of tuff, covered in places by a further layer of basalt lava.
The basalt ultimately cracked and split under attack from the weather and rainwater
seeped down through the cracks and splits to slowly erode the tuff itself.
The natural effects of alternating
very hot and very cold weather and the rain and the wind breaking down the rock's
resistance caused (and continues to cause) the emergence of the tall cones of
tuff capped by hard basalt which the Turks call Fairy Chimneys. Where there is
no basalt layer to protect the tuff lovely valleys have been formed connected
to the plateau by steep canyons of andesite and basalt.
At the beginning of Christianity,
the early Christians made countless cave churches and monasteries. There are over
400 scattered all through the valleys waiting to be explored.
Places worth seeing :
The Göreme Open -air
museum with its carved churches, the Ihlara Valley, the underground cities of
Kaymaklı or Derinkuyu, the fairy chimneys, Avanos with its handicrafts, Zelve
and Ürgüp.
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