Karaman Caves and Cliff Houses

Nobody visits Karaman as a tourist. It's a agricultural town, famous for apples. It sits at about a thousand meters elevation. Sprawling concrete apartment boxes. A hundred km from Konya, home of Rumi.

Ah, but east of here is the town of Taşkale, the Manazan Mağaraları caves, and Inescu. And while there are no busses, and it's well off the tourist trail, it's worth visiting. Fortunately our hotel front desk knows of a taxi driver that we could hire for the whole day. Sold!

At 9:00 our ride shows up. He's expecting typical tourists. We get in and off we go. His English is sketchy so we're making good use of Google Translate and a proprietary in-ear translation earbud called “EarDance”. Kristen tells him about her ancestors from Turkey, from Harput, Malatya and Azerbaijan, and that we're traveling all over Turkey exploring where those connections are. Soon enough we arrive at the Manazan Mağaraları caves. These date from 300-500 AD, or about 1400 years ago, similar to Cappadacia. Certainly not the oldest ruins we've visited, but we've got a guide with us this time.

It's a long uphill boardwalk up from the tea stall at the road, then some stairs and into the caves. We've brought lights, so we follow our guide deep into the dark tunnel, where we come upon a ladder in the absolute complete darkness but for our lights. Up we go, another short tunnel and a much taller ladder, and we find ourselves in a huge rectangular cave dug into the limestone. It's about 6 meters across and 5 high, and at least 50m deep. One end is at the cliff face 12m high and lets light in. And pigeons. Surprisingly we've met no bats in any of our cave explorations. Along both sides of this great hall are rooms, each about 4m x 3m, which were probably each for a family. At least 60 of these rooms on two levels. This must have been quite an apartment complex, although dark.

Huffing and puffing our way up

It doesn't look like it's very far up, but trust me, at this high elevation we felt it

The rock here is a clayey limestone. Easy enough to dig into, and strong enough to hold it's shape. Plus, this type of rock is very dry and is excellent at preserving organic material. A very well preserved body of a woman was found here in 1980. She's been dated to 1,400 years old. Hair and clothing were intact. We had earlier visited the Karaman Historical Museum, and noticed a desiccated body in a case there, and didn't think much of it. That was her.

The caves in Cappadacia are in volcanic tuff. Here it's limestone, at Sille (see earlier posting), they were dug into a sedimentary conglomerate. In other parts of the world, there's similar caves in China in glacial loess, and the Native American cave dwelling sites are in sandstone. One purpose. Many different geologies.

This is the great hall, Apartments located on either side and about 50 m in length

Gary and our Taxi Driver tour guide admiring the cave homes

Boardwalk along the edge of the cave houses allows us up into some of the dwellings

We are invited to tea at the tea house at the road by the base of the trail to the cave homes. By this time our taxi driver has recognized that we aren't typical tourists, but really engaged and adventurous travelers, interested in the stories and culture of the area. That leads to conversations with the tea lady, and an invitation into her abode. She showed us her ceremonial costumes hanging on pegs, and took down a drum and started thrumming. So Kristen started dancing. That completely broke the ice, and soon she was dressing Kristen in a traditional robe, belt, hat and scarf, and Kristen was dancing and cavorting with the proprietress of the tea stall. A truly magical and unexpected moment.

Playing dress up, traditional Turkish Style

I think there's some similarity in our looks

Really channeling my Turkish Legacy

With promises to return, we continued down the road to the town of Taşkale. One side of town is a high cliff of the same clayey limestone, and is riddled with caves, which have been used since antiquity for grain storage, and are still being used. Well over a thousand years of limestone granary use. Sacks of barley, wheat, etc can be stored for decades without decay. There is also a mosque carved into the rock, one of only two in Turkey. A very serene place to sit and contemplate the world.

This is the center of town

These storage rooms are still used today

This is the entrance to the mosque inside the cliff

And this is the mosque inside the cliff

Our next stop is another cave, called Incesu, and is a natural limestone cave. It has been developed for tourism with a steel spiral staircase going down, and a 1.1km paved pathway (of limestone pavers) with lights the whole way. There were of course many stalactites and stalagmites and columns, as one would expect. There were also delicate soda straws, ribbon formations, flowstone, and extensive rimstone dams across the floor.

On the drive between Taşkale and Incesu we passed many small limestone travertine quarrying operations. None of them are active on this day, but square cut blocks of limestone are piled between the road and quarry. Back through Taşkale and soon to the tea house where we have lunch. The proprietress hopes Kristen will come back and visit. But we probably will never be near here again. Such is a nomad's dilemma. Friends constantly made and promises to return unable to be kept.

On the road to the caves. We're about a mile high in elevation up on the plateau

Interest to the caves is rather unremarkable

But once we enter, we find ourselves on a walk of over 1 km

I've never been a fan of colored lights and caves but then again, it was kind of cool

We should also mention that we stopped twice in our taxi to pick up two women hitchhikers. Both were returning from either sheep herding or farming and rely on the generosity of passing drivers to give them lifts to and from their fields.

Yes, that's her pickaxe. I can't imagine how old she is but she seems to be an excellent health physically