I’ve been in Turkey for 28 days and haven’t written a word about it. Apologies to my heartbroken fans ;) Lately we’ve taken the approach of pretending like we’re living here rather than visiting, sort of soaking it all in more passively and taking our time for granted. It’s been so lovely and writing a blog post felt a bit at odds with our little charade.

Our Turkey leg (lol) started by meeting our friend Chris in Cappadocia, a region in the central countryside known for its beautiful landscapes and rock formations. It really is gorgeous, sprinkled all over with these rocky spires formed 60 million years ago by a fortuitous combination of water erosion and volcanoes. The locals call these spires “fairy chimneys” and we’d heard they were beautiful but didn’t realize until we arrived just how ubiquitous they were. The town was really built within these structures, some hotels were even carved into the rocks like caves.

Every morning at sunrise, hundreds of air balloons rise from the local towns for an aerial view of the scenery and you can climb up onto one of the area’s enormous hills to watch them all ascend at once. It feels almost spiritual watching the multicolored balloons peacefully hover over the stone-cut towns.

Similar to how the unyielding forces of geology have shaped the area’s terrain, the relentless pressures of trade and war seem to have shaped the civilization. This area was strategically situated along the Silk Road, which made it highly coveted by the empires of the time. Between the 1200’s BC and 1900’s AD, the region was attacked or conquered by the Assyrians, Phrygians, Lydians, Persians, Macedonians, Seleucids, Romans, Christians, Byzantines, Seljuks, and Ottomans. And unlike most strategic locations, there were no ports to escape, no materials to build big walls or fortresses. So the locals found a clever way to weather these constant attacks: they went underground. They built secret networks of rooms and tunnels hundreds of feet below ground, where they would often have to hide for months while under siege. They did such a good job keeping it a secret that modern civilization didn’t even know about these “underground cities” until the tunnels were discovered by accident in the 1960s.

We took a tour of one of these networks and I loved seeing all the little ways necessity forced their ingenuity. 2800 years ago, they built a ventilation system that would allow them to stay underground indefinitely, with air vents hidden all around the city. They dug tunnels 7 floors below ground, adjusting direction whenever the rock was getting too soft to be safe. Each floor was compartmentalized to be fully functional, outfitted with specific rooms to store food and collect water and partition waste (and of course, pray for their safety). All passageways were narrow so that an attacking army would be forced to come in single-file, and every floor had only a single entrance with an Indiana Jones-esque boulder standing by to be rolled over as a blockade.

We hit it off with a lovely Portuguese couple on our tour and spent the next evening being put to shame on American pop culture knowledge over dinner and drinks with them. From Cappadocia the 3 of us flew to Istanbul, where Chris parted ways after seeing the major sites with us. Since then we’ve been taking it slow and just relishing being here. More on Istanbul soon :)

If you want to see more pictures, you can find them here or in the Photos section!