Rock-cut architecture of Cappadocia

Rock-cut architecture in Cappadocia in Central Turkey includes living and work spaces as well as sacred buildings like churches and monasteries, that were carved out of the soft tuff landscape.

[2] Since this soft stone is comparatively easy to work, people were probably carving it into dugouts by the early Bronze Age.

It is probable however that in the Bronze Age at the latest, when the region was in the middle of the Hittite empire, the first passageways and rooms had been cut into the rock, as well as reservoirs and possibly even refuges in the cliffs.

[5] The earliest attestation of these structures is in Xenophon's Anabasis, which mentions people in Anatolia who had built their houses underground.

After the Christian church was re-organised under the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus) in the fourth century AD, ever larger groups of Christians followed them over the next few centuries, settling in Cappadocia and building cloistered communities, which meant that they needed ever more and ever larger residential and religious spaces.

As a result of the gradual emigration of the Christian inhabitants, the existing cloisters were slowly taken over by Turkish farmers, who renovated them according to their own needs.

The final Turkish inhabitants moved out of the cave settlement at Zelve in the 1950s after earthquakes had done significant damage and made the structures increasingly dangerous.

Inside, they took the form of a labyrinth of passageways which were unnavigable for outsiders, and could be sealed with large rock doors, around a metre high and shaped like mill-stones.

In order to supply the people within with fresh air for breathing, heating, and lighting for a siege of up to six months, there was a complex system of ventilation shafts, which still function today.

The largest is probably the largely unexplored city of Özkonak, located about ten kilometres northwest of Avanos, with perhaps nineteen levels and 60,000 inhabitants,[9] but the best known and most frequented by tourists are Derinkuyu and Kaymakli.

The ground-level caverns have been partially integrated into the houses built in front of them and continue to be used as stables and storerooms to this day.

The largest of these is Zelve and the best-known is Göreme, but whole cities of these cliff buildings can also be seen at Soğanlı valley, Gülşehir, and Güzelyurt.

At these sites, underground cities are mixed with residential complexes, cloisters, work spaces of other sorts and churches in the steep cliffs.

Inside the internal tunnel system, too, moving around is made difficult by steep, narrow passageways and vertical chimneys.

The key difference from built church architecture is the fact that the builders were not constructing a structure and had no need to plan supporting walls and columns since they only had to carve out the rooms from the existing rock.

Possibly under Arab-Islamic influence all depictions of Jesus, the apostles, and the saints were forbidden by Leo III as being impious.

Among the most common paintings were scenes from the life of Jesus, like his nativity, baptism by John the Baptist, miracles, Last Supper, crucifixion, entombment, and resurrection.

In the 13th century, the Byzantine author Theodore Skoutariotes mentions the convenient temperatures of the tuff caverns, which were relatively warm through the cold Anatolian winters and pleasantly cool in the hot summer months.

[15] In 1906, the German scholar Hans Rott [de] visited Cappadocia and wrote about it in his book Kleinasiatische Denkmäler.

[16][17] In the same period, Guillaume de Jerphanion went to the region and wrote the first academic work on the rock-cut churches and their paintings.

In the 1990s, the German ethnologist Andus Emge worked on the development of the traditional residential structures in the Cappadocian town of Göreme.