Turkey Guide
South Central Anatolia
Göreme Open-Air Museum
Address: 2km from the village, up a steep hill on the road to Ürgüp
Opening time: Daily 8.30am–5.30pm; winter closes 5pm
Price: 12YTL
The Göreme Open-Air Museum – easily reached by walking – is the best known and most visited of all the monastic settlements in the Cappadocia region. It's also the largest of the religious complexes, and its churches, of which there are over thirty, contain some of the most fascinating of all the frescoes in Cappadocia. Virtually all date from the period after the Iconoclastic controversy, and mainly from the second half of the ninth to the end of the eleventh century.
The best preserved and most fascinating of all the churches is the Tokalı Kilise ("Church with the Buckle"), located away from the others on the opposite side of the road, about 50m back towards the village. The church is different in plan to others in the area, having a transverse nave and an atrium hewn out of an earlier church, known as the "Old Church". Most striking as you enter is the bright blue colour used in the background to the paintings. The frescoes of the Old Church, dating from the second decade of the tenth century, depict various scenes from the life of Christ. They are classic examples of the archaic period of Cappadocian painting, which was characterized by a return to the forms of the best work of the fourth to sixth centuries: the style is linear, but like the mosaics of Aya Sofya in İstanbul, the faces are modelled by the use of different intensities of colour and by the depiction of shadow.