Journey 02 · Türkiye
Stone Made of Weather
Cappadocia, ten days underground and above it
Published 8 Aug 2025 · Travelled 20–29 Jun 2025
- 7 moments
- 10 days
- 29 km
- Summer
- Türkiye
- 15mm and 105mm · f/5.6 · 1/320
- 38.6486° N, 34.8319° E
- 15mm and 105mm · f/5.6 · 1/320
- 38.6486° N, 34.8319° E
- Göreme ridge
- 05:50
- 9°C, cold start, dead calm
At five the burners start coughing in the dark and the whole town glows from inside like a lit tent. By six there are a hundred balloons using the valley as a staircase. I shot from the ridge above Göreme with both bodies working — one frame wide for the arithmetic, one tight for the light on the chimneys.
- 50mm · f/8 · 1/400
- 38.6295° N, 34.8050° E
- Uçhisar
- 17:10
- 28°C, clear
The castle rock is a tenement carved by centuries of tenants — rooms, stairs, dovecotes, all bored into one outcrop until the hill became hollow architecture. From the road below you can read the whole floor plan in the cliff face. As someone from a city of fifteen million, I recognise the impulse exactly.
- 28mm · f/8 · 1/320
- 38.6733° N, 34.8536° E
- Zelve Open Air Museum
- 10:20
- 31°C, hot
People lived in these cones until 1952, when the rock finally grew too tired to be trusted. Now the houses stand open to the weather like section drawings — a staircase to a missing floor, a niche for a lamp that went with the family. Erosion built the town and erosion is repossessing it, patiently.
- 28mm · f/2.8 · 1/30 · ISO 3200
- 38.6424° N, 34.8459° E
- Göreme Open Air Museum
- 11:40
- 18°C, cool inside the rock
In the rock churches the frescoes survive where the light couldn't reach — Christ Pantocrator on a ceiling of carved ash, pigment holding on by the grace of darkness. No flash, obviously; f/2.8, a held breath, and the K-1's sensor doing what I bought it for. The guard and I nodded at each other like colleagues.
the eyes in these frescoes were scratched out centuries ago. the faces remain. it is somehow worse.
The plate · Göreme · 08:30 · 24°C
Breakfast is a landscape too
A Turkish breakfast arrives as terrain: olives, cheeses, eggs with sucuk, honey with the comb still in it, bread beyond census. The waiter brought çay in a tulip glass every time mine dropped below half, wordlessly, all morning. I photographed the table once and then respected it as infrastructure.
- 50mm · f/4 · 1/250
- 38.7147° N, 34.8460° E
- Avanos
- 15:30
- 29°C, warm
Avanos has thrown pots from the red Kızılırmak clay since the Hittites, and the town's walls double as drying racks and display shelves. Gourds and pottery lined up on a ledge, a curtain of beads in a doorway, a potter's wheel audible somewhere inside. I bought a small bowl I did not need, as the system intends.
- Kızılçukur (Red Valley)
- 19:45
- 24°C, clear, cooling
- Last frame
The last evening I walked into Kızılçukur with a water bottle and no plan, which is the correct amount of plan. At sunset the ridges do not reflect the light so much as agree with it — every fold of rock going rust, rose, ember in sequence. I made the frame, sat on a warm rock, and let the rest of it happen unrecorded.
- 28mm · f/8 · 1/125
- 38.6606° N, 34.8560° E
The route
7 stops
Journey completed
Ten days, seven stories
- Distance walked
- 89 km
- Frames exposed
- 1650
- Balloon mornings attempted
- 4
- Balloon mornings flown
- 2
- Frescoes photographed before the guard's cough
- 9
- Favourite moment
- The second dawn, when a hundred balloons inflated in the dark around me like slow lungs
- Best food
- Testi kebab cracked open at the table like a ceremony, which it is
