| Text-excerpt by Hazel Tucker and Andus
Emge
copyright © 2006
In the early 1980st Cappadocia was identified as a “cultural
tourism” centre, and the Tourism Encouragement Act had
significant implications for the way that tourism would develop
there. This important piece of legislation ensured generous
incentives for private tourism investment whilst also annulling
the prohibition of foreign companies acquiring real estate.
As a consequence, large scale tourism facilities grew rapidly
in the region, particularly in the towns of Ürgüp,
Avanos and Nevs¸ehir.
Next to the development of large scale tourism in the bigger
Cappadocian tows around the area the situation in the Göreme
village is of different kind.
The heritage attraction in Göreme - Cappadocia
Göreme is situated in the middle of a triangle formed
by the three towns of Nevs¸ehir, Ürgüp and
Avanos, and lies at the meeting point of four valleys in the
middle of the Cappadocia region. Named the province of Nevs¸ehir
in modern Turkey, Cappadocia was the ancient name for this
region where the land comprises the out-spill of two volcanoes.
The volcanic ash hardened to become tufa, a soft porous rock.
Over millions of years this rock has eroded to form natural
cones and columns, locally termed peribacalari, or "fairy
chimneys", on the landscape and, for centuries, these
have been carved and hollowed to form cave-dwellings, stables
and places of worship.
According to much of the tourist literature on Cappadocia,
the region was “discovered” by the West in the
early twentieth century when a French priest named Guillaume
de Jerphanion conducted and published a study of rock-cut
churches in the Göreme valley. Followed by other scholars,
Jerphanion’s work served to mark off the Byzantine churches
in the Göreme valley as being of key historic significance.
Other writings and photographic representations from the early
twentieth century emphasise both the historic and visual significance
of the churches and the frescoes on their rock-carved walls,
thus denoting their value for tourist interest. Contemporary
travel guide books and tourist brochures all repeat this emphasis
with descriptions and photographs of the frescoes in the churches.
Approximately three hundred cave churches and monasteries
dating between the 9th and the 13th centuries still remain
scattered throughout the valleys in the entire region. The
Göreme valley that was studied by Jerphanion, however,
is a particularly concentrated area of monastic settlement.
Part of the valley became enclosed as the Göreme Open-Air
Museum in 1950, followed by UNESCO World Heritage Site designation
in 1985. There are also many rock-cut churches in and around
the site of the township named Göreme today (situated
1.5 kilometres from the museum site). This was originally
settled as a Turkish farming village and the oldest mosque
there is dated 1686.
If you like to read more about the development of tourism
in Cappadocia, you can download the following article for
private use:
World Heritage and Cultural Tourism - The Case of
Cappadocia in Turkey
by Hazel Tucker and Andus Emge
(This chapter will appear in a book titled ‘Tourism
Development, Practices and Planning in Turkey’ ed. by
Cevat Tosun. The book will be published byAshgate Publishing,
UK in 2007.
download
article as PDF © (Englisch)
Two other articles by Dr Hazel Tucker were published as pre
PhD articles which are also available via this website for
private use. Tucker conducted her ethnographic study over
a ten year period between 1995 and 2005. The main initial
research questions addressed the change that tourism had brought
about in the village, how villagers had involved themselves
with tourism, and how the interactions were played out between
tourists and tourism and villagers and village life (the work
is published as a whole in Tucker, 2003).
"The Ideal Village:
interactions through tourism in Central Anatolia "
"WELCOME TO THE
FLINTSTONES OF CAPPADOCIA - Where experience is hypo-real
and troglodytes are virtual!
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