Cappadocia Cave Churches and Fathers

1. What Cappadocia Holds for a Christian Visitor

Cappadocia is a volcanic region of central Anatolia, in modern Turkey, where centuries of Christians cut churches, chapels, refectories, tombs and whole monasteries into soft rock, and painted the insides of a great many of them. The surviving churches number in the hundreds across the valleys around Goreme, Cavusin, Zelve, Ihlara, Soganli and Selime, with dated painting running from roughly the ninth century into the thirteenth. Cappadocia is also the homeland of Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, the three bishops who gave the doctrine of the Trinity the vocabulary the whole Church still uses.

Travel coverage of the region tends to stop at the balloons, the cave hotels and the fairy chimneys. The Christian content is the reason any of it was carved. A visitor who knows what to look for is walking through the ordinary parish infrastructure of a Byzantine province, preserved because the rock is soft enough to dig and dry enough to keep paint, and abandoned rather than demolished when the Christian population left in the twentieth century.

Goreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia were inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1985. The inscription and its criteria are published in the World Heritage List entry for the site.

2. The Rock and Why It Could Be Carved

The material that made Cappadocia carveable is tuff, a rock formed from consolidated volcanic ash. Eruptions of the great Anatolian volcanoes, Erciyes above Kayseri (the Mount Argaeus of classical writers), Hasan Dag to the south west and the Melendiz range, laid down thick ash sheets across the plateau over a very long period. Rivers, frost and wind then cut the sheets into valleys, leaving the pillars and cones that tourism calls fairy chimneys, many of them capped by a harder block of basalt that shielded the softer column beneath.

Tuff has two properties that decided the history of the region. It is soft enough when freshly exposed to be worked with a pick and an adze by ordinary people without specialist masons, and it hardens on contact with the air, so a cut room becomes stable. A family could dig a house. A village could dig a church. A monastery could dig a refectory with a table and benches left standing in the floor, because carving furniture out of the living rock was easier than making it out of scarce timber.

What that meant for church building

Everywhere else in the Byzantine world a church was an expensive assembly of quarried stone, brick, mortar and timber, and the shape of the building followed what the materials could hold up. In Cappadocia the builders were removing material rather than stacking it, so they copied masonry architecture for its own sake. Rock-cut churches here have columns that hold nothing, domes with no structural need to be domes, barrel vaults cut into solid rock, blind arcades, cornices and even imitation stonework courses painted onto the walls. The architecture is a portrait of a built church, carved into a hillside by people who wanted their chapel to look like the real thing.

The dryness of the plateau did the rest. Plaster and paint that would have perished in a damp climate survived here in rooms that were sealed, buried or simply forgotten, which is why Cappadocia holds an unusually large body of provincial Byzantine wall painting.

3. Cappadocia in the New Testament

Cappadocia is named twice in the New Testament, and both references matter for reading the region. Luke lists Cappadocians among the crowd who heard the apostles speak on the day of Pentecost: "Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia" (Acts 2:9). The First Letter of Peter is addressed to "the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia" (1 Peter 1:1), which places organised Christian communities in the province within the apostolic generation.

Cappadocia had been annexed as a Roman province under Tiberius in AD 17, and it sat on the road system that carried the Gospel east from the Aegean coast. Christianity in the region is therefore very old, older than any surviving building, and the painted caves are a late chapter in a story that starts in the first century. Nothing standing in Cappadocia today can be tied to the apostolic period. What the Scripture references give is the timescale: this was Christian country for something close to nineteen centuries before the last congregations left.

Martyrs and local cult

The region produced martyrs under the Roman persecutions, and their names recur on the walls of the painted churches centuries later. Mamas of Caesarea, on whom Basil preached a homily, is one local example. The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, soldiers left to freeze on a lake in Armenia Minor, were preached by Basil himself and are painted repeatedly in these valleys, usually as a row of standing figures in the ice. Saint George, whose cult was strong across Anatolia, is a recurring subject in Cappadocian painting, generally mounted and killing the dragon, sometimes paired with Saint Theodore doing the same.

4. The Cappadocian Fathers

Three fourth century bishops from this region are known together as the Cappadocian Fathers. Basil the Great was bishop of Caesarea, the modern Kayseri, from 370 until his death in 379. His younger brother Gregory became bishop of the small see of Nyssa. Their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, whom the Eastern churches call simply the Theologian, was briefly archbishop of Constantinople and presided for a time over the Council of Constantinople in 381. Their sister Macrina the Younger, who turned the family estate into an ascetic household, stands behind all three and is honoured as a saint in her own right.

What they settled

The Council of Nicaea in 325 had confessed the Son as of one substance with the Father. Two generations of argument followed over how to say that without collapsing Father, Son and Spirit into one person, and over whether the Holy Spirit was God in the same full sense. The Cappadocians supplied the settled formula: one ousia in three hypostases, one being in three persons, with what distinguishes the three lying in their relations of origin and not in any difference of divinity. Basil's treatise On the Holy Spirit argued the Spirit's divinity from the way the Church actually prays and baptises. Gregory of Nazianzus argued it in his Theological Orations. Gregory of Nyssa carried the same doctrine into mystical theology in works such as the Life of Moses.

The Creed we say at Mass on Sundays reached its final form at Constantinople in 381, and the article on the Holy Spirit, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, carries the Cappadocian argument in it. Our guide to the doctrine of the Trinity works through the doctrine itself, and our guide to the Holy Spirit takes up the third person specifically. Both are the place for the theology. This page keeps to the country it came from.

Basil the organiser

Basil also wrote the ascetic rules, the Longer and Shorter Responses, that shaped Eastern monasticism toward common life in community under obedience rather than isolated heroics in the desert. Saint Benedict names Basil in the last chapter of his own Rule as a master to be read, which means the Cappadocian ascetic tradition feeds directly into Western monasticism as well. Outside Caesarea, Basil built a complex of hospital, hospice and workshops for the sick and destitute that later writers called the Basileias, an early institutional charity on that scale in Christian history. Our guide to St Basil the Great, Cappadocian Father covers the life in full.

5. Where the Fathers Can Be Met

Very little physical trace of the Cappadocian Fathers survives, and a visitor should know that before setting out. Caesarea, Basil's see, is buried under modern Kayseri, and the Basileias has never been located with certainty. Nazianzus and Nyssa were small places whose exact sites are argued over. The Fathers are met in Cappadocia through the landscape they described, the monastic culture they founded, and the churches later generations dedicated to them.

Kayseri

Kayseri is a large modern city at the foot of Erciyes, an hour and more from the painted valleys, and it is the historical centre of the story rather than a visual one. Basil preached here, ran his diocese here, fed the city through a famine here and built his charitable complex outside the walls. A pilgrim who wants to stand in Basil's city can do so. A pilgrim who expects to see Basil's city will be disappointed, because the fourth century layer is gone.

Guzelyurt

The town of Guzelyurt, west of the main valleys near Aksaray, is traditionally associated with Gregory of Nazianzus, and its principal church carries his name. The building visitors see is a nineteenth century Greek Orthodox church on a site with a much longer history, and it passed into use as a mosque after the Christian population left in the 1920s. The Monastery Valley below the town is lined with rock-cut chapels and dwellings. Guzelyurt is the closest thing Cappadocia has to a shrine of one of the Fathers, and it is quiet.

Chapels named for Basil

Basil's name is attached to rock chapels in several valleys, including one in the Goreme group. These dedications reflect the strength of his cult in the region rather than any personal connection to the buildings, which are centuries later than he is. Treating them as relics of Basil would be a mistake. Treating them as evidence that his own province never stopped venerating him is exactly right.

6. How a Rock-Cut Church Was Made

A Cappadocian church was excavated from the top down and from the front inward. Workers opened a face in the cliff or the cone, cut back into it, and shaped the ceiling first so that debris could fall and be cleared as the floor went deeper. Marks left by picks and adzes are visible on many ceilings. Because the roof was carved before the floor was finished, the vaulting could be as elaborate as the patron could pay for without any risk of collapse during construction.

The plans they copied

Several plan types recur. The simplest is a single barrel-vaulted nave with an apse at the east end, the size of a large room. Larger churches use a transverse nave, running side to side rather than lengthwise, which suits rock-cutting well. The most ambitious follow the cross-in-square plan standard in middle Byzantine architecture, with four columns dividing the space into nine bays and a dome over the centre, all of it carved rather than built. Some complexes have two churches, an older one left in place and a newer one cut alongside.

Painting on rock

Two techniques appear. The earlier and cheaper method paints directly onto the smoothed rock surface, often in red ochre, giving the linear crosses, birds and geometric bands found in many small chapels. The better churches were plastered first with a lime ground and then painted, which allows the modelled faces, deep grounds and gold-substitute effects of proper Byzantine wall painting. Pigment quality is a direct signal of patronage. A chapel painted in ochre on bare rock was made by a village. A church with a deep blue ground, expensive to obtain and expensive to apply, had a wealthy donor behind it.

7. Goreme and the Open Air Museum

The Goreme Open Air Museum gathers a large group of painted rock churches into a short walk, and it is the place almost every visitor sees. The site is a bowl of cones and cliffs holding a cluster of chapels, refectories, kitchens and dwellings that functioned together as a monastic settlement, with the churches placed within a few minutes of each other. The painting here spans several centuries and several levels of quality, which makes the museum a useful crash course in what Cappadocian art is.

The Dark Church

Karanlik Kilise, the Dark Church, keeps its paint better than almost anything else in the valleys. Its name is literal: the church had almost no opening to the outside, only a small window into the narthex, and the resulting darkness spared the pigments the light damage that faded everything else. Cleaning in the modern period removed centuries of soot and pigeon deposits and revealed a full middle Byzantine cycle in strong colour, with the Nativity, the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion and the Anastasis among the scenes.

Tokali Kilise, the Buckle Church

Tokali Kilise stands slightly apart from the main enclosure and holds the largest painted programme at Goreme. It has two phases: an older single-nave church with a narrative strip cycle in registers, and a much larger new church cut behind it, whose painting uses a deep blue ground of a quality rare in provincial work. The old church tells the life of Christ in comic-strip bands. The new church is monumental, with large figures and a considered theological arrangement. Seeing the two next to each other shows the shift in Byzantine painting from narrative sequence to hieratic composition better than any book plate.

The Apple Church and the Sandal Church

Elmali Kilise, the Apple Church, and Carikli Kilise, the Sandal Church, are both cross-in-square chapels with dome, columns and complete painted programmes. Their odd names come from local tradition rather than iconography, one from an apple tree or an orb held by an archangel, the other from footprint-shaped hollows in the floor beneath the Ascension scene. Both are compact enough that a visitor standing in the middle can take in a whole Byzantine cosmology at once.

The Snake Church and Saint Barbara

Yilanli Kilise, the Snake Church, is named for its painting of Saints George and Theodore spearing a dragon, and it also carries a striking figure of Saint Onouphrios, the desert hermit painted with a long beard covering a naked body. The Chapel of Saint Barbara nearby is decorated largely in red ochre patterns, crosses and enigmatic shapes drawn straight onto the rock, and it is the clearest example at Goreme of the simpler, cheaper decorative mode.

The refectories

Between the churches are dining halls with long tables and benches carved out of the floor, some with places for a dozen or more monks, a lectern niche for the reader, and adjacent kitchens with conical smoke shafts cut up through the rock. These rooms make the point that Goreme was a working monastic settlement where people ate, cooked and slept, rather than a gallery of chapels.

8. Reading a Byzantine Painted Church

A middle Byzantine painted church is laid out on a system, and once the system is clear the same church appears again and again across the valleys. The building is treated as a diagram of the cosmos. Heaven is at the top, the earthly life of Christ occupies the middle, and the saints stand at the level of the congregation, so a worshipper stands physically among the company he is praying with.

Top to bottom

In the dome, Christ Pantocrator, the ruler of all, holding a book and blessing, usually ringed by angels or prophets. In the apse at the east end, the Virgin with the Child, or in some Cappadocian churches a Deesis, with Mary and John the Baptist turned toward Christ in intercession. Around the vaults and upper walls, the great feasts: Annunciation, Nativity, Presentation, Baptism, Transfiguration, Raising of Lazarus, Entry into Jerusalem, Crucifixion, Anastasis, Ascension, Pentecost, Dormition. On the lower walls at eye level, standing saints, martyrs, bishops and soldier saints, facing outward.

Some things worth knowing

The Anastasis, the scene Western art calls the Harrowing of Hell, shows the risen Christ pulling Adam and Eve up by the wrist out of broken tombs, standing on the shattered gates of death. Eastern churches use it where Western churches would paint a Resurrection with an empty tomb. The Dormition shows the Virgin on a bier with Christ behind her holding her soul as a swaddled infant, which reverses the Nativity image deliberately. Bishop saints appear in the apse below the Virgin in a row of frontal figures holding scrolls, and Basil is regularly among them in this region, wearing the omophorion of a bishop and often labelled in Greek.

Donor portraits are common and they are historically valuable. A small kneeling figure in secular dress presenting a model of the church, with a painted inscription naming him and sometimes dating the work by the reigning emperor, is the reason art historians can date any of this. Cappadocia has several such inscriptions, and they are the anchor points for the whole regional chronology.

Dates given for individual Cappadocian churches in this guide follow the painted donor inscriptions and the standard art-historical literature on the region. Attributions and dates for churches without inscriptions are estimates and are contested in places.

9. The Churches Outside Goreme

The museum at Goreme holds perhaps a dozen churches. The region holds hundreds, and the ones outside the fence are where the character of Christian Cappadocia is clearest, because they are unlit, unstaffed and standing in villages and fields.

Cavusin

The village of Cavusin, a short distance from Goreme, has two things worth the walk. The church of Saint John the Baptist is a large early basilica high in the cliff face, partly collapsed, and it is among the oldest substantial churches in the region. Below it stands a church whose painted programme includes portraits of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros Phokas and his family; an inscription places the work in the mid 960s, during his reign, when the emperor passed through the region on campaign. Imperial portraits in a provincial rock church are unusual, and they show that Cappadocia was not an obscure backwater in the tenth century.

Zelve

Zelve is a set of three valleys packed with rock-cut dwellings, chapels, a mill and a mosque, occupied continuously into the twentieth century until erosion made it unsafe and the last inhabitants were relocated in the 1950s. Zelve gives what Goreme cannot, which is the sense of a whole living settlement in the rock, with churches inside it rather than beside it. The painting is mostly simple ochre work, including a chapel with a fish and cross scheme.

Soganli

The Soganli valleys, further south and much less visited, contain a scattering of painted churches across a farming landscape. Karabas Kilise, the Church with the Black Head, carries an inscription dating its painting to the eleventh century and holds a full programme in good condition. Others in the valley, with names like the Church with the Dome and the Snake Church, are reached on foot up the hillsides. Soganli is where a visitor who has done Goreme goes to be alone with this material.

Mustafapasa and the late Greek churches

Mustafapasa, the Sinasos of the Greek period, is a different kind of Christian site. Its churches are built rather than cut, they date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they belonged to a prosperous Orthodox community that was still there within living memory of the grandparents of people now alive. The church of Saints Constantine and Helena is the main one. The stone houses with carved facades in the village were Greek Orthodox merchants' houses. Mustafapasa is the place to understand section 15 of this guide, on how Christian Cappadocia ended.

10. The Ihlara Valley and Selime

The Ihlara valley is a gorge cut by the Melendiz river through the plateau south west of the main Cappadocian valleys, and its walls hold dozens of rock-cut churches along a walkable stretch of river. Ihlara is greener, cooler and quieter than Goreme, and the churches are entered directly off the path.

The churches along the gorge

The chapels near the main stairway include Agacalti Kilise, the Church under the Tree, with a fine Ascension in the vault and a Daniel in the lions' den; Yilanli Kilise, another Snake Church, whose most striking painting is a vision of punishment with serpents attacking the damned; Kokar Kilise, the Fragrant Church, with a cross-and-hand composition in the vault; and Sumbullu Kilise, the Hyacinth Church, with a carved facade. The style in this part of the gorge often looks less Constantinopolitan than the Goreme churches and shows contact with Syrian and Eastern Christian visual habits, which fits the geography.

Belisirma and the church of Saint George

Further along the gorge at the village of Belisirma is the church known as Kirk Dam Alti, dedicated to Saint George. Its donor inscription is one of the most instructive texts in Cappadocia, because it dates the work by reference both to the Byzantine emperor and to the Seljuk sultan then ruling the region, and shows a local Christian family commissioning a painted church under Muslim rule at the end of the thirteenth century. Christian life in Cappadocia continued for a long time after the political situation changed, and this inscription is the plainest evidence of it.

Selime

At the northern end of the valley the village of Selime sits under an enormous rock-cut complex often called the Selime Cathedral, with a basilical church of two aisles, a huge refectory, stables with mangers cut into the walls and a warren of connected rooms on several levels. The scale is closer to a fortified monastery or a caravanserai than to the small chapels downstream. Selime is a hard scramble and it rewards it, because nothing else in Cappadocia gives the same impression of a large institution living entirely inside a mountain.

11. Crosses Without Faces: the Iconoclast Question

A number of Cappadocian chapels are decorated with no human figures at all: red ochre crosses, lozenges, palmettes, birds, fish and geometric bands, drawn straight onto the rock. Guides frequently attribute these to Byzantine iconoclasm, the imperial policy that suppressed religious images in two phases in the eighth and ninth centuries. The connection is plausible for some of them and cannot be assumed for all.

What is solid

Iconoclasm itself is solid history. Imperial hostility to images ran roughly from the 720s to 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea restored the veneration of images, and again from 815 until 843, the year the Eastern churches still keep as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The Council of Nicaea II defined the distinction the Catholic Church also holds: veneration is given to the image and passes to the person represented, while worship belongs to God alone.

What is not settled

Whether a given Cappadocian chapel is aniconic because of imperial policy is another matter. Simple ochre decoration was also the cheap option, used by poor villages in every century, and some of these schemes are demonstrably later than the ninth century. Painted crosses in a rural chapel are evidence of a small budget at least as often as they are evidence of a doctrinal position. A guide who tells you flatly that a cross-decorated chapel is iconoclast is going beyond what the evidence carries.

12. The Underground Cities

Derinkuyu and Kaymakli are the best known of the excavated underground complexes open to visitors, running many levels below the surface with ventilation shafts, wells, stables, storerooms, wine and oil presses, chapels and circular stone doors that roll across a passage and can only be moved from the inside. Others, including Ozkonak and Mazi, are smaller. Popular accounts present them as refuges built by Christians hiding from Roman persecution. The archaeology does not support that.

What the evidence says

The complexes were dug and enlarged over a very long period. Parts of them are older than Christianity in the region. Xenophon, writing in the fourth century BC, describes houses dug underground in eastern Anatolia with living quarters for people and animals reached by a ladder, which shows the technique was ancient and local. The Christian layer is real and visible, since chapels with apses and painted crosses were cut into these systems, but it sits on top of something already there.

The functions that fit the evidence are storage and refuge. Underground rooms hold a stable cool temperature and are excellent for grain, wine and stock. Rolling doors, blocked passages, ventilation designed to be defensible and communal wells suit a village that expects periodic raiding rather than a permanent underground population. Anatolia saw sustained Arab raiding from the seventh century into the tenth, and later periods of insecurity followed. A village that could take its people, its animals and its food underground for a few weeks had a serious survival advantage.

What a visitor actually sees

Narrow sloping passages, often low enough to require stooping for long stretches, opening into rooms with cut niches and shafts. The chapels are usually small, sometimes cruciform, and plain. The ventilation shafts are the most impressive engineering, running the full depth of the system and doubling as wells that could not be poisoned from the surface. Anyone who dislikes confined spaces should know that the tourist routes involve extended stretches of crouching in the dark with people moving in both directions.

13. Monastic Life in the Valleys

Cappadocian monasticism was mostly small in scale. Rather than the great imperial foundations of Constantinople or the fortified houses of Mount Athos, the valleys held modest communities of perhaps a handful to a few dozen, each with a church, a refectory, cells, a kitchen, storage and often a burial area, all cut into one cliff face or one cone. Some were family foundations. Some were attached to a village. Hermits lived alone in cut cells with a small chapel next door.

The shape of the day

Their life ran on the Byzantine office: vespers in the evening, the night office, matins at dawn, the hours through the day, and the Divine Liturgy. Manual work, mostly agricultural, filled the rest. The refectories with their carved tables show communal meals eaten in silence while a brother read aloud from the niche at the head of the table, which is the same arrangement Benedict prescribes in the West and which both traditions inherit from the same fourth century sources. Basil's ascetic rules stand behind the pattern, and this was his country.

Continuity with living Orthodox monasticism

The tradition these valleys represent continued elsewhere after they emptied. Orthodox monastic life continues in houses that keep the same offices, the same fasts and the same iconographic tradition, described in our guides to the Meteora monasteries in Greece and to visiting Orthodox monasteries. Cappadocia is that world with the people removed. A visitor who has been to a working Orthodox monastery will read these empty rooms far more accurately than one who has not.

14. Dovecotes, Soot and Scratched Faces

Almost every painted church in Cappadocia is damaged, and the causes are worth separating because a single explanation for all of it would be wrong.

Use as farm buildings

Much of the loss comes from ordinary agricultural reuse. After the churches went out of Christian use, villagers used the rooms as stables, stores and above all as dovecotes, since pigeon droppings were the standard fertiliser for the vineyards and orchards of the region. Walls were replastered to give birds a surface, nesting holes were cut into painted surfaces, and generations of soot from fires blackened everything. Cleaning campaigns in the modern period have recovered a great deal of painting that was invisible under this covering.

Deliberate defacement

Some damage is targeted: eyes gouged, faces scraped, hands removed, with the rest of the figure untouched. That pattern is deliberate. It can reflect iconoclastic conviction of one period or another, and it can reflect a folk belief, attested in several regions, that plaster scraped from the face of a saint had power as a remedy or a charm. Both motives leave similar marks and both have operated here over a very long time.

Graffiti and erosion

Names and dates scratched into paint by visitors run from the medieval period to the present. Erosion is the other constant: whole church facades have fallen away where a cliff has retreated, leaving an apse and half a vault hanging above a valley, which is a common sight at Cavusin and in the Ihlara gorge. Zelve was abandoned in the twentieth century precisely because the rock had become unsafe.

15. How Christian Cappadocia Ended

Christian Cappadocia ended in the 1920s, and not in antiquity. The Orthodox population of the region, which had lived there continuously since the first centuries, was removed under the compulsory exchange of populations agreed between Greece and Turkey at Lausanne in January 1923 and carried out over the following years. Villages such as Sinasos, now Mustafapasa, and Karvali, now Guzelyurt, lost their entire Christian communities. The churches were locked, converted or left, which is why so many of them survive with their fittings intact and their congregations gone.

The exchange was governed by the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, with the transfers carried out over the following years. The text of the convention is published in the League of Nations Treaty Series.

The Karamanlides

Many Cappadocian Orthodox Christians spoke Turkish rather than Greek and wrote it in the Greek alphabet, a practice known as Karamanlidika, and they are called the Karamanlides. They had Turkish as their mother tongue, Orthodox Christianity as their faith, and Greek letters as their script. The exchange was decided on religion rather than language, so they were sent to Greece, where they arrived speaking the language of the country they had left. Their gravestones and book inscriptions in Cappadocia, Turkish words in Greek characters, are one of the most poignant things in the region for anyone who notices what they are reading.

Before that

The earlier centuries were more gradual. Byzantine control of the region weakened after the eleventh century, Seljuk and later Ottoman rule followed, and the Christian population declined slowly through conversion, emigration and pressure while never disappearing. The Belisirma inscription of the late thirteenth century, the eighteenth and nineteenth century churches of Mustafapasa, and the schools and merchant houses of the Greek villages all show a community that was still functioning very late. The break at the end was administrative and abrupt.

Christians in Turkey today

Turkey has small Christian communities today, largely concentrated in Istanbul, Izmir and the south east, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar, Armenian Apostolic and Syriac Orthodox communities, and a small Catholic presence of Latin and Eastern Catholic parishes. Cappadocia itself has no historic resident congregation. The churches in the valleys are museums and monuments, and the Christians who come to them are visitors.

16. Visiting as a Catholic

A Catholic in Cappadocia is visiting churches of the Byzantine tradition that are no longer in use for worship, in a country where the Christian population is small. That situation asks for a particular kind of attention, and it changes what a pilgrimage here can be.

These are museums, so bring the liturgy with you

No Mass is celebrated in the Goreme churches and no candles are lit in the Ihlara chapels. What a pilgrim can do is pray in them silently, which nothing prevents. Standing in front of a Deesis and praying the Jesus Prayer, or saying the Creed in front of a row of painted bishops that includes Basil, connects the room to what it was built for. Our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is sets out the difference between a pilgrimage and a holiday, and it applies with unusual force in a place designed for prayer and now sold as scenery.

Respect for a country that is not Christian

Modern Cappadocia is Muslim, and the courtesies of any Muslim country apply: modest dress in villages, restraint around mosques and prayer times, no assumption that religious display is welcome in public. Local guides may be Muslim and are often deeply knowledgeable about the Christian material. Treating that knowledge with respect is basic decency and it produces better visits. Our guide to Islam and what Catholics should understand about it gives the background.

Practicalities that will not go stale

The sites are outdoors, on uneven rock, with steps cut for people who lived there and climbs that are steeper than they look. Sensible shoes, water and a torch are the three things that improve a Cappadocia visit most, the torch above all, because the unstaffed chapels outside the museums are unlit and a beam turns a black hole into a painted church. Interiors are cold even in summer. Prices, hours and access arrangements change and this guide does not carry them; check them locally when you go.

If you are never going

Most readers of this page will never go to Cappadocia, and the material is still worth having. The Fathers who came from here are read everywhere. The feast cycle painted on those walls is prayed everywhere. Our guide to making a virtual pilgrimage sets out how to keep a season of prayer attached to a place you cannot reach, and the full set of destinations is indexed in our guide to Christian pilgrimage sites.

17. Frequently Asked Questions