Cappadocia: "Land of the Beautiful Horses"

Cappadocia, like Polynesia, “Africa”, Sahara, is such a famous land to be synonym with a stereotype.

The very name makes us thinking of strange looking geological formations, with hot air balloons flying among them. How to tell the story of a voyage in such a well-known place?

Maybe, beginning with its name:  “Land of the beautiful horses”, was called by Persians, and the etymology never fails to inspire a delighted giggle among tourist carried on hack-pulled carts.

The ancient region called Cappadocia, in fact, was much larger than what is now the mere province of Nevsehir. It was rightly famous for horse breeding, and in those times, sparing from the Hittites to the Crusades, it was not a tourist curiosity: when, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine Emperors lost this region forever, they lost forever the chance to field a cavalry force, until then the core of their military power. Not the battle itself, not the loss of land, but the loss of a strategic asset.

So this region, the very heart of Anatolia, rich with gorgeous agriculture, water, and strategic passes, was the key for dominating Asia Minor. So the anthill looking castles carved inside of imposing rocks, the famed “underground cities”, the valleys dotted with fortifications, had a very different importance in the past centuries…

To “tell” about Cappadocia, it should be seen as a place where people did live in, and where people fought, and died, for.

Landscapes are so peculiar to look unearthly, to the point that they have been often chosen as extra-terrestrial location set for sci-fi movies.

It’s not the vegetation or the human activities to dominate the region, but the earth, in shapes making it to look alive and colors contrasting with the sky. The famed Cappadocian wines seem to sprout directly from the heart of the land, and to taste like its very essence.