Nothing on the drive suggests Ihlara Valley is there. The steppe of Aksaray province, in central Türkiye, runs flat and treeless. Then the ground opens: a canyon fourteen kilometres long and a hundred metres deep, green the whole way along its floor. The Melendiz cut it through the tuff the Cappadocian volcanoes left, and the gorge makes its own weather. Its walls block the wind, its depth holds shade and the river keeps the soil wet, so the floor runs several degrees milder than the land above. That is enough for pistachio, poplar and willow inside a canyon walled by dry steppe. Four hundred steps drop from the village edge into it, and the temperature falls with you as you go.
At the bottom the trail traces the river under poplars, with tuff walls high above, pocked with cave mouths. That soft rock is why the valley filled with people. From about the seventh century monks and villagers cut the walls into chapels and homes. More than a hundred churches have been counted, their frescoes still holding colour in the dry air. Kokar and Yılanlı stand a few minutes apart, small cool rooms cut into the cliff, the paint close over your head, saints and crosses in red ochre. Downstream the faces change. The churches at this end took their geometry and their stark, wide-eyed figures from Syria and Egypt; nearer Belisırma the work follows the Byzantine fashion of the capital. Halfway along, wooden platforms stand out over the river on both banks, where you eat trout grilled over embers with the current running under the boards. At the far end a whole monastery is carved into the cliff at Selime, a cave cathedral with kitchens and stables stacked through the rock. The last church painted here was Kırkdamaltı, around 1290, and its donors put themselves on the wall. There they are: Basil Giakoupes in a turban and Turkish robe, his wife Tamar in Christian dress, handing a model of the church to Saint George. Nothing in the valley was painted after theirs.