Things to Do in Ürgüp

Ürgüp sits in Nevşehir province, in the heart of Cappadocia. The wider landscape — Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia — has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1985.

The town has been known by several names. Byzantine sources call it Osiana / Hagios Prokopios; under the Seljuks it was Başhisar; in the Ottoman period, Burgut Kalesi. The present name, Ürgüp, is the one that stuck.

Approximate road distances from the centre of town:

The hill in the middle of town, about 80 metres above the streets, is the first thing to do — partly because it takes twenty minutes, and partly because it explains the rest. From the top you can see how Ürgüp is built into and out of the same rock.

The name comes from wish-making: visitors have long tied strips of cloth at the tomb on the summit. Two domed monuments stand on the hill. One is traditionally associated with the Seljuk sultan Rükneddin Kılıçarslan IV; a grave beside it is traditionally linked to Alaeddin Keykubad III. Sources differ on the dating of the structures — some place the original building in 1288, others describe the conversion into a tomb in 1852, during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid.

The hill is also where the Tahsinağa Library was founded in 1855, described as one of the oldest libraries in Anatolia.

The most photographed fairy chimneys in Cappadocia stand about 1.7 km west of Ürgüp, on the Ürgüp–Ortahisar road. Three cones — usually read as two adults and a child — give the formation its name.

Geologically they are unusual. They formed within the Kavak ignimbrite, and unlike most fairy chimneys their caps come from a pumice layer inside that ignimbrite rather than from a harder rock above it. They are lit at night.

Ürgüp is surrounded by valleys that most day-trip itineraries never reach.

Kızılçukur (Red Valley) lies between Ortahisar, in Ürgüp district, and Çavuşin, and runs for roughly 1.5 km. The walk passes through several tunnels — the longest around 37 metres, ending in a steep 20-metre descent — and passes the Üzümlü Church. It joins the Meskendir Valley and comes out at Çavuşin. Its terraces are where people gather in the late afternoon to watch the sun go down; the rock turns the colour the valley is named for.

Gomeda Valley sits west of Mustafapaşa and north of Ayvalı. It is thought to have held a settlement of some 600 households, with two churches, two necropolises and an underground city. It is full of tunnels and dark caves — bring a torch and sensible shoes.

Pancarlık and Üzengi are the quieter two. Pancarlık has a rock-cut church; Üzengi is a deep valley on Ürgüp's doorstep.

Six or seven kilometres from Ürgüp, a single rock rises out of the middle of a small town and has been hollowed out into a castle. At over 60 metres it is among the tallest rock-cut structures in Cappadocia — a defensive settlement of interconnected rooms reached by tunnels and stairs, used through the Byzantine and Ottoman periods.

It was closed in 2004 and reopened in 2013 after restoration. For safety reasons only part of the interior is open to visitors, but the climb is the point: the view from the top takes in the valleys in every direction.

Five kilometres from Ürgüp is the village recorded in 1476 and again in 1927 as Sinason. Until the 1924 population exchange it was an Orthodox Greek village of wealthy wine and medicine merchants, who left behind around 700 stone mansions — 93 of them a century or more old — and some thirty churches and chapels.

The stonework is the reason to go. Sinasos masons turned cut stone into carved façades; the resemblance to houses in Mardin has led to the suggestion that the craftsmen came from the southeast.

In 2021 Mustafapaşa was named one of the UN World Tourism Organization's Best Tourism Villages.

The quiet one. Recorded as Babayan as late as 1928, the village was later renamed after Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha, the grand vizier, who is also credited with bringing its first drinking water. Its stone bridge was built in 1938–39 by the villagers working together with a master mason from Nevşehir, Osman Usta.

It is thought to have been a Greek village once, but conversion to Islam happened early enough that its people were not moved in the 1923 exchange — which is why it feels different from Mustafapaşa: continuously lived in rather than repopulated.

Thirteen or fourteen kilometres north, on the Kızılırmak — the longest river in Türkiye — Avanos is the pottery town. The red clay from the riverbed has been worked here for thousands of years, and the workshops still throw on kick wheels.

Avanos is also where our sister bathhouse stands: Alaaddin Hamam, a historic Turkish bath in the centre of town, run by the same family as Ürgüp Hamam. If your day ends closer to Avanos than to Ürgüp, that is the natural place to finish it.

Cappadocia has been growing grapes for a very long time, and Ürgüp is the centre of it. The local white grape is Emir — a native variety of the high volcanic tuff plateaus around Ürgüp, Avanos and Nevşehir, planted between roughly 900 and 1,300 metres and grown commercially nowhere else. It makes high-acid, mineral wines, which is not what most visitors expect from central Anatolia.

Three producers are open to visitors:

Turasan, on Tevfik Fikret Caddesi in the Yunak quarter, is the oldest and best known name in Ürgüp. Its rock-cut cellar, production floor and shop are open daily. Tastings are generally charged, and it can get busy when tour groups arrive.

Mahzen Şarap Evi, the Sarıkaya family's cellar on İstiklal Caddesi, has been making wine since 1983 — Ürgüp's first home producer. Alongside grape wines it is known for fruit wines: mulberry, pomegranate, strawberry, redcurrant. It is small and personal rather than industrial.

Kocabağ is in Uçhisar, about 9 km away — outside Ürgüp, but an easy detour. Its tasting room looks over the Pigeon Valley, and it has a rock-cut cellar of its own.

Opening hours and tasting fees change; it is worth checking before you set out.

Ürgüp's International Grape Harvest Festival (Uluslararası Ürgüp Bağ Bozumu Festivali) is held in September; the 54th edition takes place on 4–5 September 2026. It is a town festival — folk dance, music, and the harvest itself — rather than a tourist event, which is precisely what makes it worth timing a visit around.

Cappadocia's balloons fly all year; there is no closed season. But the number of days actually flown varies a great deal. Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October) are the most reliable, summer is usually calm enough, and in winter fog, frost and shifting winds push the cancellation rate up sharply.

There is no launch field in Ürgüp itself. Balloons take off from the valleys around Göreme, and depending on the wind the flight can drift towards Avanos. Guests staying in Ürgüp are collected from their hotel before dawn by the operator's own transfer and brought back afterwards.

Whether a flight goes ahead is not the operator's decision. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation grounds all flights when wind speed passes the permitted threshold or when visibility is too poor. When that happens, the established practice is a full refund or a free reschedule to the next suitable morning — though this applies to official weather cancellations, not to a guest who changes their mind or misses the pick-up.

The valleys are also used on horseback, on quad bikes and in open jeeps, and all three start within a few minutes of Ürgüp.

Horse riding suits the landscape better than anything with an engine — Cappadocia's old name, Katpatuka, is usually read as "the land of beautiful horses". Rides run from an hour to half a day, and the sunset ride through the valleys is the one people book.

ATV tours are the fast version: an hour or two through the valley tracks and up to a viewpoint, usually finishing at sunset. Dust is part of the experience.

Jeep safaris cover more ground and are the easier choice if you would rather look than drive — the same valleys, in a vehicle that can take a family.

All three are seasonal in practice: comfortable in spring and autumn, hot at midday in summer, and weather-dependent in winter.

Spring (April–June) and autumn (September–October) are the two comfortable seasons: mild days, cold-enough mornings for a balloon, and the vineyards either in leaf or in harvest.

Summer is hot and dry, and the middle of the day is best spent indoors or underground.

Winter is cold and sometimes snowy, and the rock landscape under snow is the version most people never see.

There is a reason a Turkish bath sits at the end of a day in Ürgüp rather than the start of it. You walk a lot here — up Temenni, up the rock at Ortahisar, down a valley, over cobbles — and the hammam is what the town has always done afterwards.

Ürgüp Hamam is on the main square, in the centre of town. The ritual is the old one: the heated marble, the scrub, the foam, and tea afterwards. It is a short walk from almost everything on this page.