Ihlara Valley is a canyon fourteen kilometres long sunk a hundred metres into the bare steppe of Aksaray province, in central Türkiye, invisible from the plain until its rim, green along the river on its floor, with its walls hollowed into more than a hundred churches painted with frescoes by the Byzantine monks who lived in them, and it is walked from the stairway at Ihlara village to the rock monastery of Selime at the far end. The Melendiz river cut the gorge through the tuff of the Cappadocian volcanoes, and from the village edge the canyon is a green slot in brown steppe, with poplars, willows and pistachios on the floor watered by the river while the plateau above is dry; the stairway of nearly 400 steps drops into the gorge, and the path along the river passes the churches one after another, Kokar and Yılanlı among the first, chapels cut straight into the cliff with their ceilings painted in a style closer to Syria and Egypt than to Constantinople, and further downstream the faces change to the classical Byzantine of the capital, two ways of painting a saint in one valley. In Kırkdamaltı the donors had themselves painted on the wall, Basil in a turban and Turkish robe and his wife Tamar in Christian dress, handing a model of the church to Saint George.
Halfway down the valley at Belisırma wooden platforms are built out over the river on both banks, where trout is eaten cross-legged over the water. At the far end a whole monastery is carved into the cliff at Selime, a cave cathedral, kitchens, stables and tunnels stacked through the rock and climbed on worn steps with the valley below. In April and May the meltwater fills the river and the canyon floor leafs out weeks ahead of the plateau, and from late October the poplars turn yellow under a rim that is already bare. Ihlara is a green crack in a brown plain, and the monks painted its walls from the inside.