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 sits on soft volcanic rock — ash and tuff from the eruptions of Erciyes and Hasandağ — that wind and rain have carved over millions of years into valleys, cones, and the tapering pillars locals call peribacaları, or fairy chimneys. Each chimney is a column of soft stone standing under a harder cap of basalt; when the cap finally topples, the pillar erodes away. People did not just look at this rock — they moved into it, hollowing the soft stone into homes and churches and, beneath the plains, into whole underground cities. Derinkuyu, the deepest, drops some 85 metres and once sheltered as many as 20,000 people during raids.
The region is busiest at first light. 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; you can ride up in a basket or watch the whole armada for free from a valley rim. 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 still bright after a thousand years. The whole landscape — Göreme National Park and its rock sites — has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985, and families lived in the carved rooms into the 20th century, many of them occupied still. 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 shifts colour around you.