Urgup Tourism Travel Agency

Small group tour: Visits North Cappadocia: Uçhisar, Göreme Open Museum, Avanos, Pasabağ, Devrent Valley, Çavuşin

Our tour starts at 09:30 by pick-up from your Cappadocia hotel. First we will drive to Uçhisar Castle. This natural fortress is the highest rock formation in the Cappadocia and affords amazing views from the top. Your guide will explain to you how and when this crazy landscape came into existence.

Our next stop is Göreme Open Air Museum. Your guide will give you an overview of the history  about this Byzantine complex of churches before leaving you free to discover the impressive rock-hewn churches of the site. The churches and chapels in the Goreme Open Air Museum date from the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. Inside the churches, the beautifully painted frescoes depicting famous biblical scenes are a unique testimony to the post-iconoclastic Byzantine art period.

After lunch we visit Avanos, an attractive town with cobbled streets, and views over the river. The Kızılırmak river gives red silt which has been used as ceramic clay for centuries. Avanos has been a centre of pottery since Hittite times. We will see a kick-wheel pottery demonstration and you are welcome to try your hand at this tradition.

We then visit Paşabağı, also known as Monk's Valley, where we see the famous mushroom-shaped fairy chimneys as well as St. Simeon’s monk cell carved into the rock .

At Devrent Valley, also called Imagination Valley, the hoodoo landforms, known here as fairy chimneys, take on all sorts of animal shapes including a well-known camel rock formation.

Our last stop is to see the old Greek houses in Çavuşin village, abandoned by their Christian occupants in 1924 during the Greek/Turkish population exchange set in motion after the signing of  the Lausanne treaty.

On our way back we stop and see the Ürgüp fairy chimney family, the very famous symbol of Cappadocia. We end our day with a carpet-weaving demonstration at a traditional carpet cooperative and you are dropped back to the hotel you are staying at around 16:00.