Heritage in West Asia / Eastern Mediterranean
Explore heritage sites and cultural practices from West Asia / Eastern Mediterranean.
Sites in this Region
Showing 2 documented sites
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Göreme National Park and Rock Sites of Cappadocia
Cappadocia is a landscape carved by ten million years of volcanic eruption and erosion into fairy chimneys, cliff faces, and deep valleys into which Christian communities carved entire cities from the living rock. The Byzantine cave churches of the Göreme valley contain some of the finest fresco cycles of the Middle Byzantine period, preserved by the same tuff that now vibrates each morning as up to 200 hot air balloons float above them.
Hierapolis-Pamukkale
Pamukkale — Cotton Castle in Turkish — is a thermal spring site where calcium carbonate-rich waters have built travertine terraces of luminous white over hundreds of thousands of years. Above them sits Hierapolis, a Graeco-Roman spa city with a complete theatre, one of the world's largest Graeco-Roman necropoleis, and the Plutonium — a cave confirmed in 2013 to emit lethal carbon dioxide concentrations that ancient writers understood as a literal entrance to the underworld and that modern tourists enter with the same cameras they use everywhere else.