Konya –Kapadokya 3 Days 2 Nights H/B

 05:15 (Konyaalti) 05:45 Departure
· 1St Day; Breakfast at Akseki, Coffee break at Seydisehir, Konya Mevlana Museum, Lunch at Konya, visiting a Kervansaray, checking in to, dining and overnight at the hotel
· 2nd Day; Breakfast, Ürgüp, Pasabag, Devrent Valley, Three beauties, Yusuf Koç Church and Monastery, Church of John the Baptists, Çavusin Church, Pigeons valley, Lunch, Lovers valley, The red valley, Pottery and onyx workshops, Göreme national Park and Göreme valley, uçhisar valley, Carpets Cooperative, dining and overnight at the hotel
· 3rd Day; Breakfast, The Underground City, Rest at Aksaray, Lunch and return to hotel(s) at approximately 18:00.

KAPADOKYA

Cappadocia is the historical name of a vast region in central Anatolia. Today it is used for a much smaller touristic region. The most attractive aspect of the region comes from the landscape, the formation of this landscape and then how it has been utilized by man. There were many eruptions in the geological times in the area forming the present landscape, Mount Erciyes (4000m), Hasandagi (3000m) and a series of other smaller volcanic mountains. Vast amounts of volcanic tufa (you may say dust) settled in the area with basalt and the like hard nucleus. Rain and wind and all the natural elements of erosion worked it out till today we now have the extraordinary landscape that some describe it as another planet. Indeed the color and the shape of the landscape are breathtaking. All shades of color with chimney-like spikes spread throughout the region. They are called ‘Fairy Chimneys’. The juxtaposition of hard basalt and the soft tufa and the erosion have come up with these cone shapes and the younger ones still have their basalt hats on them. When Man came, he started tooling at it and made houses, churches, underground cities, storage etc. From this friendly material, he started living and working, and when time came, defended himself. The material is soft enough to dig and hard enough to hold. If you had a pick and a shovel you had a room, a house or a church or even an underground city, if you worked at it hard enough. Although there are traces of all civilizations, we see more of the Christian era from the first century on being heavily in use from the 5th c AD through 1923. They have made churches that are sometimes plain and other times fully painted with breath-taking frescoes suiting their time and purpose. At the times of defense, they dug and went under ground to enable them to live totally underground for extensive periods of time. People who regularly lived here have also benefited from this underground existence. The houses are backed in to the rock rooms and were cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Now they are being used as vast underground restaurants, discos and even hotels built in to the rock by modern means. A vast area is spread with churches of all shapes, models and frescoes, underground cities of all sizes, and of course all shapes that you can think of. The majority are cone-shapes or chimney shapes. Names like ‘Three Beauties’ are given to groups or single shapes in the region by the local people. Cappadocia has a lot more to offer the visitor other than the fairy chimneys (that kind of steal the show from the others). The Seljuk and Ottoman mosques, medreses and the caravanserais are just a few to mention. Caravanserais were very functional for the trade route east to west. They were built like castles with some of them being as big as the castles. They were built on the major routes about 40 km apart; a days walk for a caravan carrying goods between great distances. They were well fortified and well guarded. A foundation was set up by the patron builder for the maintenance and up keep. Staying at the caravanserais was free up to three days. All the requirements of the traders were provided. The bath, mosque, settle repairs, shoeing the horses, etc. were available to the guests