A Trip to Cappadocia
On a pre-Covid-19 trip with my wife to Turkey, our departing flight to Cappadocia through Istanbul (the world’s largest airport) was delayed for over an hour. So… despite running breathlessly through IST from one terminal to the next, we missed our connection. The good news: we got rebooked a few hours later on a flight departing at 1:15 in the morning.
Arriving in the dark at the Museum Hotel, our destination in Cappadocia (at 4:30 am, thank you), we had no idea that this would be the view from our window at dawn:
We took a day to explore our spectacular hotel and its even-more-spectacular surroundings. Passionate antique collector Omer Tosun had the vision in 1998 to create a unique, boutique art hotel. He opened it in 2002 as an actual living museum with a growing collection of artifacts in all the guestrooms. No two spaces are the same, as they were carved from caves.
A staff member told me I reminded him of the hotel’s founder, Omer. You tell me.
Left: I met Omer at breakfast and created this portrait of him sitting below a photo of his grandfather. Right: A shot my wife took of me.
Speaking of doppelgangers: pigeons of many a (matching) feather flock together at this hotel.
Exploring on foot, I loved photographing the magical, majestic, and magnificent landscape of Cappadocia composed of “fairy chimneys” formed by volcanos and shaped by the wind. Humans then dug caves in the soft rock formations, and you can still find some that are lived in to this day.
The timelessness of the land seems best illustrated through black and white images. Here are three sublime subjects below. The middle one (the vertical) is Orfahisar Castle, a fortress built on the biggest and tallest fairy chimney in the region.
That was enough for our first day.
On our second morning, we embarked on a sunrise hot-air balloon excursion above the surreal moonscape.
For more “uplifting” images of the landscape from the perspective of a hot-air balloon, see the slide show at the bottom of this post. ;)
We spent our third and final day with professional photographer Nuri Corbacioglu exploring non-touristy sites that afforded wonderful photographic opportunities. What a special eye-opening experience it was to be with a talented local shooter who knew what would appeal to a fellow photographer.
In the Persian language, Cappadocia means “land of beautiful horses,” for which the region is still well known. So we started and ended the day immersed in equine environments. First stop was a working horse ranch.
Next stop was a local potter’s studio, which afforded lots of portrait opportunities in a dusty, dramatically lit environment. Here are two of my favorites:
And, finally, we ended the day at sunset with a wild horse roundup.
For more images of the hot-air balloon excursion, enjoy this slide show. Click on any to enlarge.
