MAY 2024 · ESCAPE
Love Valley - Cappadocia
Love Valley, Cappadocia
The formations are the obvious thing. Volcanic tuff towers thirty, forty metres high, carved by wind and water over millions of years into vertical columns with swollen caps. They are monumental in the literal sense: they mark the landscape irreversibly.
But the valley floor is inhabited. That's what I was after.
An old wooden cart sits in the shadow of a fairy chimney, its wheels sunk into the sandy soil. A second cart stands in an open field further down. Both are weathered past any working purpose — the timber grey and checked, the metalwork rusted — but they haven't been moved. Poplar trees grow in a line along the valley, roots finding water in the sandy floor. Olive trees dot the terraces. On one slope, a dead and twisted tree stands alone, its stripped branches white against the pale rock behind it.
The question isn't why people chose to live here but how they kept choosing it.
Love Valley — May 2024
An ancient dwelling is carved into a mushroom-shaped formation — a doorway, a lintel, a small rectangular window cut clean into the tuff. The stone is soft enough to carve with hand tools, which is why the valley has been inhabited for centuries. The question isn't why people chose to live here but how they kept choosing it.
A yellow vehicle is parked at the base of a cluster of chimneys near the trailhead. Tourists arrive, circle the base, photograph from below. From the trail above them, the chimneys read differently: horizontal striations in the stone visible at close range, showing how the tuff was deposited in layers before erosion shaped it vertically. Geology made legible.
The hiking trail winds through grass-covered slopes past formations that look arranged, though they're not. The spiky plant growing from the grassland in the foreground of one frame is as strange as anything behind it.
A close-up of one chimney shows the horizontal stone layers clearly. The same forces that made the tower are still making it — just more slowly than seems possible to observe.
Tall fairy chimneys and a weathered wooden cart nestled at their base
Row of sculpted fairy chimneys with a tourist facility and yellow van below
Ancient dwelling carved into a mushroom-shaped stone formation
Poplar trees standing in a valley with distant fairy chimneys on the ridge
Vertical pillars of eroded volcanic tuff with green vegetation clinging to the slope
Sculpted stone faces and towers rising from the valley landscape
Dead, twisted tree standing alone against a backdrop of distant formations
Striped volcanic rock face with a tall chimney peak crowned with green vegetation
Olive trees dotting the sandy valley floor beneath towering cliffs
Hiking trail winding through grass-covered slopes toward a distant fairy chimney
Single phallic fairy chimney rising above the surrounding landscape
Undulating hills of pale volcanic rock with scattered green scrub
Eroded hillside with cypress-like trees in a narrow ravine
Cluster of fairy chimneys with yellow vehicle parked at the base
Row of monolithic fairy chimneys with poplar trees in the foreground
Close-up of cylindrical fairy chimney with horizontal stone layers visible
Grouping of tall stone formations with a small tree and green vegetation
Spiky plant sprouting from grassland with formations silhouetted behind
Two prominent fairy chimneys rising from terraced slopes and scattered greenery
Ancient wooden cart beside a fairy chimney, sheltered in the shadow
Weathered wooden cart in an open field with rolling stone landscape