Guide Books - Alastair Sawday's Special Places To Stay Turkey

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Mr Gorurgoz made a fortune as the founder of a fashionable Istanbul restaurant, then invested in a cluster of utterly archaic cave dwellings cut into a cliff in Urgüp. His audacious idea was to convert an entire cave neighborhood into a single luxury hotel without so much as touching the outward appearance. So from the outside the houses look just as they have for the last 100 or even 1,000 years: an ancient warren of holes cut with seeming randomness into the dusty cliff; even to the soot from old stoves remains. Inside, the spaces rival the best of the many-starred hotels of Turkey in style and comfort, charmingly embellished with antiques. Some rooms are set discreetly in their own courtyard, so you need never know who is staying next door. All are full of nooks and crannies, secret passageways and tiny terraces of the sort that normally occur in fairy tales. With a well-trained staff, theYunak Houses offer a level of service seldom found in other small hotels in Cappadocia. And you can mountain-bike through the lunar landscape or go hot-air ballooning at dawn.