Cappadocia draws well over a hundred hot-air balloons into a single dawn sky, and the ground beneath them is as strange as the flotilla above. This corner of Central Anatolia is built of soft volcanic ash-rock that wind and rain have carved into valleys, cones and tapering pillars, which locals call peribacaları — fairy chimneys. Each pillar stands under a harder cap of stone, and when the cap finally topples the pillar wears away. People did not just look at this rock. They moved into it, hollowing the soft stone into homes and churches and digging whole cities down beneath the plains. Families were still living in the carved rooms into the twentieth century, and many of those rooms are lived in now.
First light is the busy hour. Before the sun clears the ridge the balloons inflate in the dark and climb over Göreme, Ürgüp and Uçhisar as the chimneys below turn pink-gold. On the ground, the Göreme Open-Air Museum holds cave chapels carved by a monastic community that lived here from the 4th century into the 13th. Their Byzantine frescoes are still bright after a thousand years. The carved valleys are packed into a national park of just under a hundred square kilometres, with Göreme inside it and Ürgüp and Avanos six kilometres out. Derinkuyu sits apart from all of it, thirty kilometres south of Nevşehir on open farmland, so it makes a separate outing from the valleys. The deepest of the underground cities, it drops some 85 metres and once sheltered as many as 20,000 people during raids. Walk the Red and Rose valleys past vineyards and half-hidden churches, or ride out on horseback as the evening light goes amber and the rock changes colour around you.