Introduction

Introduction

This album is from a walking trip to Cappadocia, Turkey, famed for its rock churches and fairy chimneys formed from the erosion of the tuff (compressed volcanic ash). The soft rock lends itself to the carving and development of the rock formations as man-made cave houses.

Istanbul

Blue Mosque, or the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, is a historic mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, is known for the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior. It was built from 1609 to 1616, the mosque is lined with more than 20,000 handmade ceramic tiles in more than fifty different tulip designs. The mosque The design is the culmination of two centuries of Ottoman mosque development and the mosque is built with five main domes, six minarets, and eight secondary domes.

The Hagia Sophia (or Aya Sofya) was a Greek Orthodox Christian basilica (built in 537 AD), later an imperial mosque (from 1453), and now a museum (since 1931). For almost 1,000 years it was the largest church in Christendom,

Cappodoccia

People have long utilised Cappadocia's soft stone, seeking shelter underground and leaving the countryside scattered with fascinating troglodyte-style architecture. The fresco-adorned rock-cut churches of Goreme, Zelve, the Ilhara Valley and the surrounding areas provide interesting stops while walking through the dry landscape.

Kaymakli Underground City

The houses in the Kaymakli underground village are constructed around the nearly one hundred tunnels. The tunnels are still used today as storage areas, stables, and cellars. The tunnels are lower, narrower, and more steeply inclined than other underground cities in Cappadocia. While the underground city consists of 8 floors below ground, only 4 of them are open to the public. Of the four floors open to tourists, each space is organized around ventilation shafts. This makes the design of each room or open space dependent on the availability of ventilation.

Caves may have first been built in the soft volcanic rock by the Phrygians, in the 8th-7th centuries BCE. The city was used in the Byzantine era, for protection from Muslim Arabs during the Arab-Byzantine wars (780-1180). These cities continued to be used by the Christian inhabitants as protection from the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century.