Ortahisar (

Turkish Turkish may refer to: *a Turkic language spoken by the Turks * of or about Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities and mi ...

: ''Middle Castle''), previously known by its Byzantine name Potamía (

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

: Ποταμία), is a small town in the

Ürgüp Ürgüp ( el, Προκόπιο ''Prokópio,'' or Cappadocian Greek: ''Prokópi'', ota, Burgut Kalesi) is a town and district of Nevşehir Province in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey. It is located in the historical region of Cappadocia, an ...

district of

Nevşehir province Nevşehir Province ( tr, , from the Persian compound نو شهر ''Now-shahr'' meaning "new city") is a province in central Turkey with its capital in Nevşehir. Its adjacent provinces are Kırşehir to the northwest, Aksaray to the southwest, ...

, in

Cappadocia Cappadocia or Capadocia (; tr, Kapadokya), is a historical region in Central Anatolia, Turkey. It largely is in the provinces Nevşehir, Kayseri, Aksaray, Kırşehir, Sivas and Niğde. According to Herodotus, in the time of the Ionian Revo ...

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

. Ortahisar has around 3.500 inhabitants and is located about 20 km east of the provincial capital,

Nevşehir Nevşehir (from the Persian compound ''Now-shahr'' meaning "new city"), formerly Neapolis (Ancient Greek: Νεάπολις) and Muşkara, is a largely modern city and the capital district of Nevşehir Province in the Central Anatolia Region of Tur ...

. Until the mid-2010s Ortahisar was rather off-the-beaten-track when it came to Cappadocian tourism. It is now much better known and many boutique hotels have been created out of its fine old stone houses. In the early 1970s a young Scottish man named Craig Mair spent a year living in Ortahisar and wrote a book about his experiences called ''A Time in Turkey.''

Castle and churches

The small town is dominated by a rock-castle in the centre of the town, which is called ''Sivrikaya'' by the inhabitants. It is an extraordinary example of the

rock-cut architecture Rock-cut architecture is the creation of structures, buildings, and sculptures by excavating solid rock where it naturally occurs. Intensely laborious when using ancient tools and methods, rock-cut architecture was presumably combined with quarryi ...

which is typical of the region and is believed to have served as a refuge from attackers in Byzantine times. The town also contains the ''Cambazlı Kilise'' ('Church of Acrobats'), a

cross-in-square A cross-in-square or crossed-dome floor plan, plan was the dominant architectural form of middle- and late-period Byzantine Empire, Byzantine church architecture, churches. It featured a square centre with an internal structure shaped like a cross ...

church with 13th-century wall paintings which is now used as a storehouse. Aside from the rock-cut buildings in the centre of the town, Ortahisar is characterised by a series of ld stone houses. The upper floors are made of blocks of

tuff Tuff is a type of rock made of volcanic ash ejected from a vent during a volcanic eruption. Following ejection and deposition, the ash is lithified into a solid rock. Rock that contains greater than 75% ash is considered tuff, while rock cont ...

, mostly without mortar. These buildings which were only used for the storage of food in earlier times, are generally one or two stories high. The upper floor is often accessed by an exterior staircase made of tuff-stone slabs. The more recent buildings are all made from the same kind of stone, but are made of regular blocks. The exterior walls are covered with white limestone and capped with simple cornices. Northeast of Ortahisar is a rock-cut monastery complex called Hallaç Manastırı which consists of a courtyard closed on three sides but open to the south. The gathering of rubble over time means that the ground level is one and a half metres higher than it was when the structure was built, so the entrances to the monastic rooms are lower than the courtyard. After the monastery was abandoned, the locals walled up the entrances and decorated the windows with coloured paint so that they could be reused as pigeonhouses for the production of

guano Guano (Spanish from qu, wanu) is the accumulated excrement of seabirds or bats. As a manure, guano is a highly effective fertilizer due to the high content of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, all key nutrients essential for plant growth. G ...

as fertiliser. A little outside the town is a

fairy chimney A hoodoo (also called a tent rock, fairy chimney, or earth pyramid) is a tall, thin spire of rock formed by erosion. Hoodoos typically consist of relatively soft rock topped by harder, less easily eroded stone that protects each column from the ...

which contains the Üzümlü Kilise ('Grapevine Church') dating from the 8th or 9th century AD. It contains frescoes with grapevines and an image of Mary enthroned with the baby Jesus in the

apse In architecture, an apse (plural apses; from Latin 'arch, vault' from Ancient Greek 'arch'; sometimes written apsis, plural apsides) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome, also known as an ''exedra''. In ...

. Also near Ortahisar is the Sarıca church.

Economy

Ortahisar is a centre for fruit storage. The tuff-stone local caves, with a constant temperature of 10 °C in summer and winter, are used to store citrus fruits, potatoes, apples and onions, some of it transported north from Mersin. After fattening in the caves for up to nine months, the produce is transported onwards to other parts of Turkey, to Europe and to Russia.

References

Bibliography

* Peter Daners, Volker Ohl, ''Kappadokien''. Dumont, 1996, . * Michael Bussmann/Gabriele Tröger, ''Türkei''. Michael Müller Verlag 2004 . * Marianne Mehling (ed.), ''Knaurs Kulturführer in Farbe Türkei''. Droemer-Knaur 1987 .

External links

Ortahisar
{Dead link, date=April 2020 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes Populated places in Nevşehir Province Cappadocia Underground cities in Cappadocia