GOREME IN CAPPADOCIA

Please again apply all the superlatives!
Extraordinadry! Unique!
Beautiful! Unbelievable! and some more!
The landscape is unreal and the cave monasteries are lovely. The frescoa seemed more loving and gentle compared to the Romanian frescos - more about that in a footnote later!

FOOTNOTES WITH CAT

Strange thing about community animals - dogs and cats - that I will tell

DERINKUYU

The first two shots are looking up the ventilation shaft of the underground city at Derinkuyu in central Turkey. The first is taken at about 30 metres (c. 100 feet down) the second at 56 metres. This was another amazing place in which 8 000 people could take refuge underground with their animals for up to (or down at) a month at a time.






Look carefully. This "millstone" - it's about 5 foot in diameter and a foot thick - rolled by gravity to block the tunnel to stop enemies getting in. (But how did the refugees get out?) And you thought Indiana Jones was made up!!













This is the underground church. You can see the two side aisles at right and left. I think I mean transepts. It's late.



This is the font. This'd be one to tell the kids. Being baptised under ground and under water at the same time.



An underground city impossible to detect from the surface - Ruth made it down to the first stone door like a tombstone and then freaked out - John went to the morgue 56 metres down! Incredible place - Turkey left me short of superlatives! I kept saying 'Extraordinary!'

SULTANHANI

771 years before Ruth, I and our caravan arrived here, this "han" (a sort of mediaeval motorway services area/TIR truckstop/bonded warehouse) was built as one of a string of caravanserais across central Anatolia by the Seljuk Turk sultans as a place where camel trains could stop, refresh themselves and be safe from robbers. The one at Aksaray is the biggest one in Turkey.