Göreme Open Air Museum

Where it sits. Göreme is a village of a few thousand people in Nevşehir Province, in the middle of the Anatolian plateau at about 1,100 metres, roughly 300 kilometres southeast of Ankara. It sits in a bowl surrounded by the eroded valleys that make Cappadocia recognisable — Love, Pigeon, Rose, Red, Sword and White — and its houses are built into and against the rock rather than merely near it. The stone is ignimbrite and tuff, laid down by eruptions of Erciyes, Hasandağ and Göllüdağ over the last ten million years, then capped in places by harder basalt. Where a basalt block sits on softer tuff it shelters the column beneath from rain while everything around erodes, which is the entire mechanism behind the cones locally called fairy chimneys. The tuff is soft enough to cut with hand tools and hardens on exposure to air, so people have been carving houses, churches, stables and dovecotes into it for at least two thousand years.

The rock churches. The Göreme Open Air Museum, a kilometre uphill from the village square, occupies a monastic complex that flourished between roughly the tenth and twelfth centuries. Its chapels are cut as full basilicas with domes, apses and columns carved in imitation of masonry they never needed structurally. The Tokalı Church, across the road from the main enclosure, has the largest and earliest programme, with a deep blue ground made using lapis pigment. The Karanlık Kilise, the Dark Church, earns its name from a single small window: the resulting gloom preserved its eleventh-century frescoes better than any other church here, and after a long cleaning campaign that removed centuries of pigeon-droppings and soot the Christological cycle reads almost complete. Elmalı, Çarıklı and Yılanlı chapels each hold their own cycles. A separate ticket applies to the Dark Church, and photography inside is restricted.

On screen. Cappadocia's landscape appears in more productions than most travellers realise, and in fewer than the internet claims. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep (Kış Uykusu), which took the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 2014, is the essential one: it was shot across two winter months in Cappadocia, with a further four weeks of studio work in Istanbul, and the hotel at the centre of its story is a cave hotel of exactly the kind Göreme is built around. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011) worked in Turkey alongside its Romanian locations, and Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner (2014) also filmed in the region. The frequent claim that Star Wars used Cappadocia is false in every episode: Tatooine was filmed in Tunisia — Matmata, Chott el Djerid, Ksar Ouled Soltane — with Death Valley for the Lars homestead's surroundings in the original film. Cappadocia's genuine screen presence is heavily Turkish, in television serials and in a long line of domestic features that use the valleys as a shorthand for rural Anatolia.

The balloons. Roughly a hundred balloons fly from launch fields around Göreme on a permitted morning, taking off in a window before sunrise regulated by the Turkish civil aviation authority, which caps daily numbers and cancels for wind. Flights last about an hour and drift wherever the layered morning winds take them, typically over Love Valley and the Göreme museum area. Cancellation rates run high in winter and are not negligible in spring; operators usually rebook rather than refund. For those staying on the ground, the terraces of Sunset Point and the ridge above the village give the view of the fleet lifting off, and it is free.

What else to do on foot. The valleys are walkable without a guide if you accept some route-finding: Pigeon Valley connects Göreme to Uçhisar and its rock castle in about an hour and a half; Rose and Red Valleys, best in late afternoon when the tuff turns apricot, hold half a dozen abandoned chapels reachable by scrambling. Zelve, Paşabağ with its multi-headed chimneys, and Devrent's animal-shaped rocks are short drives. The underground cities of Kaymaklı and Derinkuyu, dug through as many as eight levels with ventilation shafts and rolling stone doors, lie 20 and 30 kilometres south.

Getting there and timing. Nevşehir Kapadokya and Kayseri airports both serve the region with shuttles into Göreme; overnight buses run from Istanbul and Ankara. Almost everyone stays in a cave hotel, which is the local vernacular done commercially. Steep lanes, steps and unpaved valley paths make the village hard going for wheelchair users, and the museum's chapels are all reached by stairs cut in rock.