Central Anatolia Region

iç Anadolu Bölgesi


Central Anatolia is the heartland of Turkey, the center of Anatolia. The historical region is home to the country's capital Ankara and other major cities like Konya and Kayseri.

The area is a typical closed basin at 1,200 m asl, bordered by high mountains of up to 3,000 m asl. To the south are the limestone mountains of the Taurus mountain ridge, to the north the mountain of the Black sea. But in the center is Cappadocia, the ancient region between Lake Tuz and the Euphrates, famous for its fairy chimneys. The landscape where erosion shaped the soft volcanic rock into thousands of strangely shaped towers. In a small area of a dozen villages there are cave houses, cave churches, cave hotels, and underground cities, all dug into the soft volcanic as or zufa. The carbonates of this basin are covered by younger volcanic deposits, some are again covered by neogene obruk limestone. The typical karst feature of this area are collapsed dolines, called obruk.