Where to go hiking in Cappadocia, Turkey

“You’re not claustrophobic, right?” says tour guide Giray Özcas as we squeeze through a four-foot-high tunnel, 260ft beneath the hoodoos and rock churches that tessellate the landscape of Cappadocia. I’m not, as far as I know, but as we descend further, the air becomes stuffier, the walls close in tighter and I’m relieved when we emerge into a large, echoing cavern. It’s dimly lit by electric light, but its walls are blackened with char marks from ancient linseed lamps. Its perimeter is riddled with hollow doors, each one leading into another tunnel, spidering off into the darkness.

This is the underground city of Derinkuyu. It was discovered in 1963 by a local man while he was renovating his basement. The construction work created a crack in a wall, through which several of his chickens went adventuring, never to be seen again. He knocked the wall down and discovered a vast underground metropolis, 172sq miles in area, complete with staircases, bedrooms, wine presses, churches and even stables.

The oldest parts of Derinkuyu are thought to have been built as long ago as 1200 BCE by the Hittite people, who dominated Anatolia during the Bronze Age. Its purpose was to create a refuge from invading Phrygians, from whom they were under near-constant attack. As many as 20,000 people, along with their livestock, could have lived down here for a month or so at a time before re-emerging into the sunlight. “Everyone needs their vitamin D,” says Giray. He tells me that there are as many as 60 of these underground cities beneath Cappadocia, and every year they’re finding more.

“Some people say there’s hobbits or djinns [spirits] living down here,” says Giray. Cappadocia is an upside-down world: its cities are subterranean, while its overground landscape is like the interior of a cave system, covered in stalagmite-like rock pillars known as fairy chimneys. They’re caused by wind erosion, but are named for the folkloric belief that they were created by the djinns who live beneath the ground.

The typical image of Cappadocia, adorning coffee cups and postcards, is that of dozens of hot air balloons soaring above the landscape. But I want to see Cappadocia up close, both above ground and below, so I’m exploring on foot.

Giray and I emerge, blinking, into the daylight, and embark on a hike through a series of interconnected trails. Although it looks a barren landscape from a distance, it’s surprisingly fertile up close — the smell of apricot carries on the breeze and trees ripe with plums and black mulberries line the path. Rock-cut houses rear up above our heads on either side, like wasps’ nests papering over the hillsides. In translation, the valleys have very straightforward English names. Pigeons flap around our heads in Pigeon Valley, where dovecotes were carved into the rock centuries ago. Lovebirds embrace in Love Valley, which became a secret sanctuary for courting couples in the 1960s and 1970s, when arranged marriages were more common.

After a couple of hours’ easy, flat walking, we arrive at Göreme, home to a spectacular collection of rock churches dating from the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. The most famous, the Dark Church, has walls emblazoned with vibrant paintings of Christian saints that have stood the test of time thanks to their lack of exposure to daylight.

Cappadocia was culturally and ethnically diverse, until the 1923 ‘population exchange’ saw virtually all Anatolia’s Greek Orthodox Christians forcibly removed to Greece, with some 400,000 Greek Muslims moving the other way. Giray and I take a taxi to the village of Mustafapaşa, formerly a Christian settlement known as Sinasos, which was left a ghost town. Entrepreneurs are renovating the historic buildings into boutique businesses like Gül Konakları, a hotel where we stop for a drink.

“Before the exchange, these people were friends; it was politicians who drove them apart,” Giray says, as he sips on Turkish coffee — “Or Greek coffee, as they call it in Greece,” he says with a wry smile. I’m on the harder stuff, having ordered a glass of Emir, a citrussy white wine made from a Cappadocian grape. “People had been making wine here for thousands of years, but all the knowledge was lost after the exchange,” says owner Murat Örnek. “There’s a big revival at the moment in traditional winemaking using these native grapes. Cappadocians are rediscovering their past.”

I retire to my rock-cut room in Kayakapi cave hotel that evening and fall asleep to the sounds of Cappadocia drifting in through my open window. The call to prayer rings out from a hillside minaret. Dogs bark in the valley. Their echoes mingle amid the fairy chimneys, then vanish, sucked down to join the company of djinns lurking deep below.