Paşabağ Valley

The chimneys with several stems and caps

Paşabağ sits about 1 km off the Göreme–Avanos road on the way to Zelve, and the official tourism portal singles it out for fairy chimneys with multiple stems and caps, some housing chapels and living spaces that are unique to this area. The shapes are more extreme here than at Love Valley or Paşabağ's neighbour Çavuşin because the valley floor is wide and flat: fallen caps and collapsed trunks lie where they eroded, so you can walk around complete examples instead of guessing at them from a slope.

Photographers get the shot they came for from the flat path in the first 200 metres past the gate. Keep walking: the densest cluster of three-headed cones is another five minutes in, and the path is graded and pushable in a stroller as far as the hermitage.

The combined red tour gives this stop about 40 minutes, which is exactly enough for that walk and no more.

St Simeon's hermitage inside a three-headed cone

The chapel every guide points at is dedicated to St Simeon, and the official portal describes what makes it worth the climb: a hermit's shelter built into a fairy chimney with three heads, its entrance reached through a chimney-like narrow tunnel and decorated with crosses. Hermits working here hollowed the chimneys from the top down, cutting rooms 10 to 15 metres high, slept on beds carved from the rock and were fed by locals who hauled buckets up on ropes from below.

The steps and the tunnel are tight, and anyone with knees or claustrophobia should read the shelter from the path instead, the exterior is the photographed thing anyway. What the site teaches, better than any museum panel in the region, is that the chimneys were not just scenery but addresses: a vertical house of five storeys with a church on top and a rope-and-bucket door.

Zelve is 2 km up the same road: three valleys of dwellings and churches that the official tourism portal calls one of the most intensive concentrations of fairy chimneys in the region, and the Avanos-area history records as a monastic centre from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, the place where the first religious seminars for priests were held in the vicinity. It was inhabited into the twentieth century, which is why its cave houses look lived-in rather than excavated.

Two caveats before you drive over. The fee-list annotation that grants the two-sites-one-ticket rule also declares the Balıklı (Fish) and Üzümlü (Grape) churches closed, and those are the two painted names guidebooks mention, so go for the valleys and the mosque-in-a-cone, not the frescoes. And the ticket rule says nothing about re-entry or same-day-only, so ask at the second gate how they validate it rather than assuming, our read of the Turkish annotation is that one ticket, one visit at each site, is the intent.

If you hold the MuseumPass Cappadocia instead, both sites are placemarks on the pass map and you skip the ticket window at each.

The dolmuş, hourly, with unpublished fares

The operator Ürgüp Vip Turizm runs the Ürgüp–Göreme–Paşabağ–Avanos line hourly from 07:30 to 20:00, returning from Avanos hourly from 08:00, and no official source publishes the fare anywhere, the operator confirms the timetable by phone on +90 384 341 81 18 but sells no printed tariff. Pay the driver in cash and small notes, and treat any figure a blog quotes as folklore.

Practical consequences: the stop is signposted at the valley turn, from which the ticket gate is a few minutes on foot. Going on to Avanos after the valley is the natural use of the line, and coming back means waiting for the next hourly departure at the roadside shelter, which in July you should plan around rather than experience. The getting-around guide has the rest of the network.

Coach, ATV or your own wheels

The red tour and the red-plus-green day both include the stop with hotel pickup, which for $19 to $21 solves the transport problem the dolmuş leaves open. Drivers will find an unpaved car park at the gate, and the site sits close enough to Çavuşin to walk from the village in about half an hour over open ground, which is the route the valley-walk chain uses.

Three honest routings, depending on what else the day holds. The middle one is what the ticket is priced for, and the table's totals assume you keep the receipt until you have left the second gate.

Two timing details worth more than the table. First, heat: the valley floor is open ground with almost no shade and the caps do not cast any, so in July and August the walk is a before-10:00 or after-16:00 event. Second, tour rhythm: the coaches cluster mid-morning and again before sunset, and since they all follow the same 40-minute pattern, arriving just behind one means you will be walking out as the next one empties, take the hour either side of lunch and you will share the valley with a dozen people.

• The ticket is one product covering two sites, printed as two €12 rows in the Ministry fee list with the annotation that one ticket visits both (the DOSIM fee list)
• Zelve's two painted churches, the Fish (Balıklı) and the Grape (Üzümlü), are closed under the same fee-list annotation, so time at Zelve goes to the valleys and the rock-cut mosque instead (the DOSIM fee list)
• St Simeon's hermits cut their rooms 10 to 15 metres high from the top of the chimney down and were fed by ropes and buckets from below (the official tourism portal)
• The dolmuş timetable is official but the fare is not: Ürgüp Vip Turizm runs the line hourly from 07:30 to 20:00 and publishes no price anywhere (the transport guide)
• The MuseumPass Cappadocia at $74.51 (€65) covers this combined site and lists Paşabağ and Zelve as separate map placemarks under the one product (the official pass page)

Take the dolmuş out at opening, do Paşabağ in the cool first hour, walk or ride the 2 km to Zelve with the same ticket, and come back to Göreme for a late lunch before the Open Air Museum afternoon, that is the strongest single day the north of Cappadocia offers without a car. With one, add free Devrent between the two gates and eat in Avanos.

Without your own transport and with only one touring day, the red and green combined day is the honest answer: $21.07 for both loops, this stop included, and you spend your energy looking rather than timetabling. The whole offer sits side by side on the Göreme tours hub, and the three-day itinerary shows where this valley lands in a longer stay. Everything in the guide starts from the homepage.