If you travel to the center of Turkey, you will find a landscape that does not look real. This is Göreme National Park. It sits right in the middle of the famous Cappadocia region, surrounded by dry hills and wide valleys. The ground is covered in tall, thin rock towers called fairy chimneys.

But what makes this specific park stand out is not just the strange geology. It is what people built inside the stones.

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Buried Under Volcanic Ash

To understand how fairy chimneys were formed, one must travel back millions of years to when volcanoes buried the region in volcanic ash.

Over time, the ash turned into a soft rock called tuff. After that, more volcanic eruptions spread a layer of hard basalt over the area. This left the region with a soft-rock base covered by a tough basaltic crust.

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Carved By Wind And Water

After the volcanoes stopped erupting, the weather began to work the land. The rain, ice, and snow fell on the rock layers nonstop.

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The crust began to crack, and water seeped into the tuff. The tuff eroded quickly due to the water. However, the basalt was strong and heavy, covering parts of the tuff rock. The tuff beneath the basalt did not erode as the rock acted as a protective over-structure for the soft rock beneath.

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These tall, thin pillars of soft rock have hard-rock caps balancing on top. Some of them go over 130 feet in height.

Carving Out Underground Cities

Because the tuff rock is so soft, it is extremely easy to carve into. Thousands of years ago, the first humans to enter these caves and mountains built homes within the fairy chimneys.

For centuries, people dug homes, churches, and even whole towns into these mountains. Some of their underground cities extend hundreds of feet underground. When invaders came, families hid in the tunnels below, safe from danger above.

These carved out caves can still be walked through today. Each morning, hundreds of hot-air balloons fill the sky above the area, offering an aerial view of these volcanic and human-carved mountains.