URGUP

" Four more hours to walk and we'll bow to the strange, tormented, fantastic, broken boulders which line the old village of Urgub (sic). The houses are huddled together against the cliffs full of so many caves. Some minarets soar up here and there from that twinkling jumble under the burning sun. Your eyes can only rest on the tangle of greenery at the foot of the village, along the river. For an hour, we rode aimlessly along the steep and winding streets, until we were dumbfounded by so much glazing whiteness coming from all over the place, so that our strained eyes hurt and finally saw everything green, red and blue and couldn't bear any more." This is the description of Urgup given by a XIXth century traveller on his tour around the world. Urgup is overlooked by a yellow cliff full of hundreds of carved cave houses.

That traveller also added : "These countless caves carved in the pumice cliff were part of a huge Byzantine necropolis which spread out and down to the plain, and it is worth seeing how today natives are using these funeral places and how they have managed to create these strange homes by building stone fronts around the openings, opening more windows here and there they built these odd houses".

The old parts such as Esbelli still have countless houses one more picturesque than the other. Urgup - once called Assiana - is an excellent starting point to visit Cappadocia and has always been a thriving, busy city. According to a document dating back to the XIXth century it is said to have had at that time 70 mosques, five churches, a lot of libraries and several caravanserais. As early as Seljoukid times it was already considered as a famous market place. Today, its fame comes from its carpet dealers, its local crafts shops and its boutiques. At the far end of the town, on the road to Goreme you will discover a vallley in a grandiose landscape. On a beautiful day , mount Erciyes stands out in the background, and in the foreground you can see two big fairy chimneys and their stone tops with two smaller chimneys between them. The Devrent valley offers strange natural ochre rocks in the shape of animals, here a camel, there a gazelle. Urgup is the ideal place to discover Cappadocia : its privileged location, the hospitality of its people and its numerous local shops add modern comfort to a protected place which has remained really authentic. Cappadocia is a Unesco world heritage site.

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