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Few landscapes on earth prepare you for Cappadocia. The tufa formations that rise from the plateau of central Anatolia, sculpted over millennia by volcanic eruption and wind erosion, look less like geology and less like architecture and more like something between the two. The Göreme valley, which sits at the region's core, is where most visitors orient themselves first, and for good reason: the rock-cut churches of Göreme Open-Air Museum preserve Byzantine frescoes that have survived inside the soft stone for over a thousand years, and the surrounding terrain of fairy chimneys and honeycombed cliffs extends in every direction without obvious boundary.

Cappadocia belongs administratively to the Nevşehir province of Turkey, but it functions as its own world, one shaped as much by the people who carved into it as by the forces that formed it. The Hittites knew this plateau. Early Christians retreated into it, hollowing out entire underground cities to shelter from persecution. Derinkuyu, the deepest of these subterranean settlements, descends through eighteen levels and once held tens of thousands of inhabitants, complete with stables, wineries, and ventilation shafts. The full-day Green Tour, which takes in Derinkuyu alongside the Ihlara Valley gorge and its riverside trail of rock-cut chapels, gives a sense of how comprehensively this landscape was inhabited rather than merely passed through.