CAPPADOCIA

The formation of Cappadocia, which is said to mean "Land of Beautiful Horses" in Persian language, goes back millions of years.

The written history of Cappadocia begins with the Hittites. Cappadocia, which has hosted trade colonies throughout history and established a commercial and social bridge between countries, is also one of the important crossroads 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 made the area a gigantic sanctuary for Christians..

  60 million years ago, in the 3rd geological period, with the rise of the Taurus Mountains and the compression of the Anatolian Plateau in the North, a series of volcanoes caused their activities, Erciyes, Hasan Mountain and Güllü Mountain, which is between the two, spewed lava into the region. The ashes accumulated on the plateau formed a soft tuff layer and the top of the tuff layer was covered with a thin lava layer consisting of hard basalt in places. Basalt, which eroded and cracked over time, leaked from the cracks of the stones and began to erode the soft tuff in the lower layer. Cones with hard basalt rock caps have started to form with the participation of the warmed and cooled air and winds in this formation, and they still continue their formation today. These different and interestingly shaped rocks were named by the peoples they housed: "Fairy Chimney". The tuff plates without basalt cover turned into valleys with erosion. These valleys, which nature gave strange shapes, were later put to work by human hand, labor and emotion. From the settlements dating back nine to ten thousand years, to the churches carved into the rocks by the first Christians, to the big and safe underground cities, it was formed by the coexistence of man and nature in a long period; Cappadocia.