Ürgüp

Every region needs a town where the wine list is longer than the excursion list, and in Cappadocia that is Ürgüp. It is a real market town with a courthouse and a Wednesday bazaar, but its restored greek-style stone mansions, its cellar-door wineries and its consistently best-in-region restaurants have made it the base of choice for travellers whose idea of a good evening involves a tablecloth.

The landmark is Üç Güzeller — the Three Beauties — a family group of capped fairy chimneys on the Göreme road that adorns half the postcards printed in Türkiye. Legend supplies the usual doomed lovers; geology supplies the usual patient answer; both are told at the viewpoint, which at sunset is one of the region’s gentlest crowd scenes.

The wine

Cappadocia is one of the world’s oldest wine landscapes — volcanic soil, high altitude, indigenous grapes like Emir and Kalecik Karası — and Ürgüp is its cellar door. The town’s producers pour tastings in carved-rock cellars where the temperature has not changed since the Byzantines used the same rooms for the same purpose. Our wine article covers the grapes; a tailor-made afternoon covers the tasting, with a driver so nobody has to spit.

The old quarter, and what the mansions are

Ürgüp's hillside lanes are lined with cut-stone houses whose carved doorways and arched windows look nothing like the cave dwellings elsewhere in the region. They are largely nineteenth-century, built by the town's prosperous Greek and Armenian families when Ürgüp was a trading centre, and abandoned after the 1923 population exchange that ended Cappadocia's Christian centuries — the same event that emptied Çavuşin and Mustafapaşa.

For decades they simply decayed. The restoration wave of the last twenty years turned the best of them into the hotels the town is now known for, which is why an Ürgüp room so often has a vaulted stone ceiling and a courtyard: you are sleeping in somebody's repurposed family house. Walk the lanes above the square for half an hour and you will pass a dozen in every state from ruin to restored.

Base or visit?

As a base, Ürgüp trades Göreme’s balloon-filled rooftops for quieter luxury — you drive ten minutes to the dawn viewpoints instead of walking, and in exchange your evenings improve markedly. As a visit, give it a late afternoon: the mansion lanes of the old quarter, tea in the square, Üç Güzeller at golden hour and dinner at one of the kitchens that made the town’s name. Several of our guests have declared the last plan the best day of their trip, which says something about both the town and the plan.

Practicalities: Ürgüp is 15 minutes from Göreme and 20 from the Open Air Museum, it has the region's largest weekly market (Saturdays), and every tour we run collects from its hotels at no extra charge. The full comparison against the other villages is on our where to stay guide, and the drive times to everything else are on the Cappadocia map.