The volcanic upland of central Anatolia that formed the Byzantine Empire's eastern frontier province, produced several of its emperors, and passed to the Seljuks after 1071.
Cappadocia occupies the high plateau of central Anatolia around Nevşehir, Kayseri and Niğde, a country of soft volcanic tuff that erodes into cones and gorges and can be cut with hand tools. That geology shaped its medieval history: churches, stores, stables and whole refuges were excavated rather than built.
For four centuries it was a frontier. From the seventh century Arab raiding columns came up through the Cilician Gates almost every year, and the region was organised for defence in depth rather than for a fixed border. It was held within the Anatolic and Armeniac themes and later organised as the themes of Charsianon and Cappadocia, the latter administered from Koron after Nyssa was destroyed by an Arab army in 838.
Permanent frontier warfare produced a landed military class whose estates and retinues made them nearly independent of Constantinople. The great Cappadocian and neighbouring houses — the Phokades, the Maleinoi, the Skleroi, the Doukai — supplied generals for the tenth-century offensives that recovered Cilicia, Crete and Antioch, and more than once supplied emperors.
Nikephoros II Phokas, from that Cappadocian military stock, took the throne in 963 after recovering Crete; John I Tzimiskes, his kinsman and murderer, followed in 969. Romanos IV Diogenes, whose family belonged to the same frontier aristocracy, came to the throne in 1068 because the empire wanted a soldier. Successive emperors also feared these families, and the legislation of Basil II against the "powerful" was aimed squarely at their accumulation of village land.
Göreme was a monastic centre for roughly nine hundred years, and the valleys around it contain more than thirty excavated churches and chapels together with refectories, cells and store rooms. The painted decoration ranges from simple red ochre designs of the iconoclast period to full programmes of the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Tokalı, Elmalı and Karanlık churches, whose figures are among the best-preserved middle Byzantine wall paintings anywhere.
Because the churches were carved rather than constructed, they preserve architectural forms — domes, squinches, barrel vaults, carved iconostases — that were copied from built models now lost. They are effectively negative impressions of Byzantine provincial churches.
Beneath the plateau lie excavated complexes of several levels, the largest at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, with living chambers, wells, ventilation shafts, stables, chapels and wine presses, closed by great rolling millstone doors that seal from the inside.
They were refuges rather than towns in the ordinary sense — places for a district's population, animals and stores to disappear into for the weeks an Arab raiding column was in the country, then to come out again. Dating them is difficult because cutting rock leaves no stratigraphy, but their use is firmly tied to the raiding centuries.
The defeat of Romanos IV Diogenes at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 did not itself cost the empire Cappadocia, but the civil wars that followed did. With the field army broken and rival claimants hiring Turkish troops against each other, Turkmen groups moved onto the plateau unopposed, and by the early twelfth century the Anatolian Seljuks held the region outright.
Christian life continued under Seljuk rule for centuries — churches were still being painted in the thirteenth century — but Cappadocia never returned to Byzantine administration. What survives is consequently a Byzantine provincial landscape frozen at the moment imperial power left it, which is why it is such unusually good evidence.