Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia is Turkey's other mixed UNESCO site alongside Hierapolis-Pamukkale, inscribed in 1985 under four criteria for both its Byzantine rock-hewn churches and its volcanic 'fairy chimney' landscape. Monastic communities began carving cells into the rock in the 4th century, later building troglodyte villages and underground cities like Derinkuyu to escape invasion.
Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, under criteria (i), (iii), (v), and (vii), making it one of only two mixed cultural-and-natural sites Travelog has covered, alongside Greece's Meteora. UNESCO describes the region as a volcanic landscape on the central Anatolia plateau, sculpted by erosion into a succession of mountain ridges, valleys, and pinnacles known as fairy chimneys, bounded by the extinct volcanoes Erciyes Dağ and Hasan Dağ. According to UNESCO, monastic activity here dates back to the 4th century, when small anchorite communities acting on the teachings of Basileios the Great, Bishop of Kayseri, began inhabiting cells hewn directly into the rock. The Göreme Open Air Museum and Derinkuyu below are the two components most worth planning genuine time around.
The property spans 9,883.81 hectares across the region between the cities of Nevşehir, Ürgüp, and Avanos, plus the sites of Karain, Karlık, Yeşilöz, Soğanlı, and the subterranean cities of Kaymaklı and Derinkuyu. UNESCO's own register counts more than 200 individual rock-hewn churches within the site, some containing numerous frescoes, alongside two underground towns and five troglodyte villages. The Göreme Valley's churches span centuries of Byzantine art: Tokalı Kilise and El Nazar Kilise from the 10th century, St. Barbara Kilise and Saklı Kilise from the 11th, and Elmalı Kilise and Karanlık Kilise from the late 12th to early 13th century.
UNESCO's account ties the region's architecture directly to its history: after the iconoclastic period ended in 842, many rupestral churches were dug and richly decorated with figurative painting, while earlier communities had banded together into troglodyte villages or subterranean towns like Kaymaklı and Derinkuyu specifically to resist Arab invasions. UNESCO calls this a landscape of harmony between human settlement and dramatic natural landforms, but is direct about the risk it faces today, noting the property's cultural features are at risk from erosion and other natural processes, compounded by mass tourism and development pressure that can never be undone once lost.
Cappadocia is reached through the nearby airports serving Nevşehir and Kayseri, with the historic towns of Göreme, Ürgüp, Avanos, and Uçhisar spread across the national park itself. The rock-hewn churches, troglodyte villages, and underground cities are dispersed across the region rather than concentrated in one town, and getting between them typically means road transport across the park.
Cappadocia earns its UNESCO status the same way Meteora does: once for what humans carved into the landscape, and once for the landscape itself, a volcanic terrain of fairy chimneys shaped by erosion long before the first monk hollowed out a cell. Between the two, Travelog's Turkey and Greece guides now cover every mixed cultural-and-natural World Heritage site either country has on the list.
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