Cappadocia, in Central Anatolia, is made of rock soft enough to cut with hand tools, and people here moved into it rather than admiring it. Wind and water have worked the valleys into cones and tapering pillars, each under a harder cap that shelters the column until it topples. Turkish calls them peribacaları, fairy chimneys. Families hollowed homes out of them and were still living in the carved rooms into the twentieth century; many are lived in now. The cliffs at Göreme hold chapel after chapel cut by monks, and you stand under Byzantine painting still bright on the ceilings. From the valley paths you see the rock above pocked with thousands of small openings: pigeon lofts, cut not for meat but for droppings that fertilised the vineyards underneath. Many were whitewashed and painted to draw birds in.
The digging also went straight down. At Derinkuyu you go down level by level, eighty-five metres below open farmland, past stables, kitchens and churches cut floor beneath floor. Narrow shafts carried air to the deepest rooms, and wells were sunk from inside so water could be drawn without opening a door. The passages are low and cold, and the strange part is that you are standing in a room where families waited out weeks at a time. Above ground the balloons inflate on the valley floors while it is still dark, so from a rim above Göreme they light up from within before the sun reaches the rock. A balloon has no steering: pilots climb and drop between wind layers running different ways to slide into a valley and out. On foot the Rose and Red valleys wind between the pillars. The floors are soft sand, too narrow for any vehicle, so an evening on horseback covers more than a day of walking. But the rock's real gift was hiding people. At every choke point in those underground cities a great millstone disc could be rolled across the passage and locked from the inside, so the people below could close one level at a time behind them.