Cappadocia for ever!

Most people come to Cappadocia for just three or four days, not realising what a large area it actually is. Of course that's plenty of time to see the main sights of Göreme, Ürgüp, Uçhisar and Avanos. It's also enough time to take in one of the two main underground cities at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, and to walk through part of the Ihlara Valley, near Güzelyurt. However, there is much more to Cappadocia than this and if you can manage to stay for a bit longer you will be able to explore some of the places that receive fewer visitors and can seem all the more magical as a result.

Take Mustafapaşa, for example. This is a wonderful small town, just south of Ürgüp, that was the old Sinasos of the Greeks. It may lack the spectacular fairy-chimney rock formations of Göreme but instead it has a collection of truly magnificent old stone houses, perhaps the most magnificent of them all being The Old Greek House, a short walk away from the main square. This epitomises the way in which the locals lived at the start of the 20th century, with ground-floor rooms set around a private courtyard. There's nothing especially surprising about this since houses all over Turkey tend to look in towards courtyards.