This Cave Lodge in Cappadocia Lets You Sleep Inside Ancient Stone

The village of Göreme sits folded into a valley of soft rock, on the flat edge of central Turkey. From a distance, you can spot slanted chimneys, cone-shaped dwellings, and the occasional minaret rise out of the landscape.

Up the slope above the village square, past the tea garden and the shuttered stalls selling apricot leather, a small footpath curves around the rock. This is the way to the Fairy Chimney Inn, a tavern-looking lodge shaped more by memory than time.

As a stay, the Fairy Chimney Inn has been around for no more than twenty years, though its earthen textures and candlelit passages may suggest otherwise. The man who founded it, a German anthropologist named Andus Emge, had arrived in the region—known since the 6th century BC as Cappadocia—to study traditional cave dwellings. He stayed long enough to build his own. With help from locals and with no interest in modern replication, he and his wife Gülcan restored what already existed, namely: the tunnels, the niches, and the chambers pressed into rock—remnants of a 1,500-year-old Byzantine monastery later repurposed as Ottoman dwellings.

Some rooms were once wine cellars, others grape presses. One had been kept as a makeshift farm. Rather than removing these details, Andus and Gülcan decided to place beds beside them.

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the inn is how it was built—inward. There is little to no distinction between the area where guests can stay and the very rock from which the place originates. Sunlight is scarce inside the living space, compensated for instead by the glow of chandeliers and candlelit sconces. In the winter, when the temperature drops to a blistering zero, the mountaintops become capped with layer upon shimmering layer of snow. All the while, there is the splendid view of Turkey’s Red Valley just outside.

Because of its location, most days pass quietly. Mornings begin with tea, boiled on a gas ring and carried outside on a tin tray. Breakfast is served on low tables, under vines: boiled eggs, flatbread, apricot jam. On the hill opposite, the hot-air balloons rise at dawn—first one, then another, then dozens. The air holds them steady like marbles in syrup.

Half of the magic at the Fairy Chimney Inn is the hotel, the other is the surrounding area. Some take to the walking trails that begin behind the inn and disappear into the folds of the valley. Five minutes by foot, The Rose Valley narrows into long corridors of pinkish stone. Further off, Zelve offers abandoned churches and empty troglodyte homes. For those who want a destination with a door and a menu, the restaurant Topdeck, in the center of town, serves pottery kebab and lentil soup inside a stone room lit by a single bulb.

At night, the village grows quiet. There are few lights in Göreme, and fewer still on the hill where the inn rests. The only sounds are the wind, sometimes a dog, and sometimes nothing at all. From the rooftop terrace, the fairy chimneys below resemble towers, though no one ever lived in most of them. Some were graves. Some were simply stone. And so the village settles once more—in silence, in stone, in something older than memory, and just as lasting.