2nd International Workshop on Plasticity, Damage and Fracture of Engineering Materials, 18-20 August 2021, Ankara, TURKEY (Online)

Conference Chair

• Tuncay Yalçinkaya
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey ( yalcinka[at]metu.edu.tr)

Local Organizing Committee

• Tuncay Yalçinkaya
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
• Mehmet Dorduncu
  Department of Mechanical Engineering, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey
• Orhun Bulut
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
• Can Erdogan
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
• Izzet Tarik Tandogan
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Scientific Committee

• Farid Abed-Meraim, Arts et Métiers ParisTech (France)
• Majid R. Ayatollahi, Iran University of Science and Technology (Iran)
• Ali Osman Ayhan, Sakarya University (Turkey)
• Can Ayas, Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)
• C. Can Aydinder, Bogazici University (Turkey)
• Lorenzo Bardella, Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
• Laurence Brassart, Monash University (Australia)
• Zeljko Bozic, University of Zagreb (Croatia)
• Alan Cocks, University of Oxford (UK)
• Serkan Dag, Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
• Laura De Lorenzis, ETH Zürich (Switzerland)
• Eralp Demir, Sabanci University (Turkey)
• Mehmet Dördüncü, Erciyes University (Turkey)
• Mert Efe, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (USA)
• Ercan Gurses, Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
• Johan Hoefnagels, Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands)
• Yile Hu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China)
• Francesco Iacoviello, Università degli studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale (Italy)
• Ali Javili, Bilkent University (Turkey)
• Benjamin Klusemann, Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany)
• Giovanni Lancioni, Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy)
• Łukasz Madej, AGH University of Science and Technology (Poland)
• Erdogan Madenci, The University of Arizona (USA)
• Lorenzo Malerba, CIEMAT (Spain)
• Hiroyuki Miyamoto, Doshisha University (Japan)
• David Morin, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology (Norway)
• Phu Nguyen, Monash University (Australia)
• Kim Lau Nielsen, Technical University of Denmark (Denmark)
• Aida Nonn, OTH Regensburg (Germany)
• Emilio Martínez Pañeda, Imperial College London (UK)
• Minh-Son Pham, Imperial College London (UK)
• Dierk Raabe, Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung (Germany)
• Timon Rabczuk, Bauhaus University Weimar (Germany)
• Daniel Rittel, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
• Stefan Sandfeld, TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany)
• Maxime Sauzay, CEA SACLAY (France)
• Alexandar Sedmak, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
• Huseyin Sehitoglu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
• Alexey Shutov, Lavrentyev Institute of Hydrodynamics (Russia)
• Igor Simonovski, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (The Netherlands)
• Stanisław Stupkiewicz, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
• Cem Tasan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
• Cihan Tekoglu, TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Turkey)
• Dmitry Terentyev, SCK•CEN (Belgium)
• Ton Van Den Boogaard, University of Twente (The Netherlands)
• Motohiro Yuasa, Doshisha University (Japan)

Invited Keynote Lecturers

• Prof. Laura De Lorenzis, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.



Laura De Lorenzis received her Engineering degree and her PhD from the University of her hometown Lecce, in southern Italy, where she first stayed as Assistant and later as Associate Professor of Solid and structural mechanics. In March 2013 she moved to the TU Braunschweig, Germany, as Professor and Director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics. There she was founding member and Chair (2017-​2020) of the Center for Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation in Engineering. Since February 2020 she is Professor of Computational Mechanics at the ETH Zürich. She was visiting scholar in several renowned institutions, including Chalmers University of Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (as holder of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006), the Leibniz University of Hannover (with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2010-​2011), the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Cape Town. She is the recipient of several prizes, including the RILEM L’Hermite Medal 2011, the AIMETA Junior Prize 2011, the IIFC Young Investigator Award 2012, two best paper awards and two student teaching prizes at the TU Braunschweig. In 2011 she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Researcher Grant. She has authored or co-​authored more than 120 papers on international journals on different topics of computational and applied mechanics.

• Prof. Odd Sture Hopperstad, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.



Odd Sture Hopperstad is professor at Department of Structural Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. He earned his doctoral degree at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in 1993 and for this work he received the ESSO prize for best doctoral degree in fundamental research. He was appointed professor at NTNU in 1998. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. Professor Hopperstad’s research activities are mainly within materials mechanics, ductile fracture, formability, crashworthiness and structural impact. Within these fields, Hopperstad has authored/co-authored about 250 articles in international journals with peer review. He has supervised/co-supervised 45 PhD students in the past and is currently supervising/co-supervising 13 PhD students. From 2007-2014, he was member of the core team of the Centre of Research-based Innovation SIMLab at NTNU, where he was heading the research area Fracture and Crack Propagation. Currently he is Research Director of the Centre of Research-based Innovation CASA and principal investigator of the Toppforsk project FractAl at NTNU. From 2008-2011, Hopperstad was Associate Editor in International Journal of Impact Engineering, and he is currently member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal. From fall 2010, he is Associate Editor in European Journal of Mechanics – A/Solids.

• Prof. Erdogan Madenci, University of Arizona, USA.



Erdogan Madenci is a professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arizona. He received his B.S. degrees in both Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and his M.S. degree in Applied Mechanics from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA in 1980, 1981, and 1982, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering Mechanics from UCLA in 1987. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, he worked at Northrop Corporation, Aerospace Corporation, and Fraunhofer Institute. Also, he worked at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, NASA Langley Research Center, Sandia National Labs and MIT as part of his sabbatical leaves. He is the lead author of four books on Peridynamic Differential Operator for Numerical Analysis, Peridynamic Theory and Its Applications, The Finite Element Method Using ANSYS, and Fatigue Life Prediction of Solder Joints. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Peridynamics and Nonlocal Modeling, the Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology, and ASME Representative to the Daniel Guggenheim Medal Board. He is an active member of the several technical committees. He is a Fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA.

• Prof. Emilio Martínez Pañeda, Imperial College London, UK.



Emilio Martínez Pañeda is an Assistant Professor (UK Lecturer) in Mechanics of Materials at Imperial College London. Before, he worked as Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Micromechanics (University of Cambridge), led by Profs. Norman Fleck and Vikram Deshpande. He joined the University of Cambridge from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where he worked with Prof. Christian Niordson as an H.C. Ørsted Fellow. Martínez Pañeda’s main research interests lie in the field of mechanics of materials, particularly in plasticity, fracture mechanics, coupled diffusion-deformation theories, and mechanism-based models for damage. He currently holds a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College Cambridge and an 1851 Research Fellowship (Brunel award) from the Royal Commission for the 1851 Exhibition.

• Prof. Dierk Raabe, Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH, Germany.



Dierk Raabe works in the fields of materials simulation, atom probe tomography, microstructures and the resulting mechanical properties of metallic alloys. He wrote and edited several books on this topic, e.g. ‘Computational Materials Science’ (1998), Continuum Scale Simulation of Engineering Materials’ (2005), and ‘Crystal Plasticity FEM in Materials Science and Engineering’ (2010) as well as more than 600 peer reviewed publications. Raabe conducts detailed comparisons between simulation and experiments. He is currently working on issues such as local thermodynamic phase states at confined spaces such as at lattice defects, alloy design, high-entropy alloys, atom probe tomography and the further development of the in-house simulation toolbox DAMASK on crystal mechanics, multiphysics and property prediction of complex materials. A special feature of the research approach is the combination of thermomechanical material processing, simulation and characterization at the atomic level. The common vision of these activities is the use of predictive simulations and their consequent engineering application for inventing advanced alloys. The aim is the physically-based design of materials with superior properties (strength, elongation, damage tolerance) for the fields of energy, mobility and health from the atomic to the macro-scale under consideration of synthesis and processing. The blend of theory, characterization, and processing is important in his approach. Raabe is a frequent plenary and keynote speaker. In 2004 he received the highest German research award (Leibniz-Award). 2008 he was awarded Lee Hsun Lecture Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in 2011 the Weinberg Lecture Award of the University of British Columbia. In 2012 he received an ERC advanced grant, which is the largest single-researcher grant in Europe. Raabe mentored more than 55 Ph.D.s, many of whom now hold leading positions in companies and academia as faculty members in the US, UK, and Asia. Since 2010 he is a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat). He is Professor at RWTH Aachen, member of the National Academy Leopoldina and Honorary Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven in Belgium.

• Prof. Timon Rabczuk, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany.



Dr. Timon Rabczuk is Professor at Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany and Head of the Computational Mechanics Group at Ton Duc Thang University in Vietnam. He has spent a 4-year stint in as a postdoctoral fellow at the Computational Mechanics group of Professor Ted Belytschko at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA and for more than a year at the Technical University of Munich before he was appointed as Senior Lecturer at Canterbury University in New Zealand. In 2009, he joined Bauhaus University Weimar as Chaired Professor of Computational Mechanics and in 2014 he became the head of the Computational Mechanics Group at Ton Duc Thang University. Professor Rabczuk’s research is on the interface between computational science, engineering, mechanics, applied mathematics and material science. His most recent interest is machine learning based solutions of partial differential equations, nonlocal operator methods, two-dimensional materials and integrated computational material engineering.

• Prof. Javier Segurado Escudero, IMDEA-Materials, Spain.



Professor Javier Segurado Escudero (Ph.D. in 2004 at the Polytechnic University of Madrid) holds since 2020 a full Professor position at the Materials Science Department, Polytechnic University of Madrid. Simultaneously and since 2008 he is Senior Researcher at IMDEA Materials Institute where he leads the research group on Multiscale Materials Modeling. His research has been focused on the prediction of the effect of the microstructure on the mechanical behavior and fracture of heterogeneous materials by the use and development of simulation techniques such as Discrete Dislocation Dynamics, Crystal Plasticity and Multiscale modeling approaches. He is also an expert in Fast Fourier Transform based computational homogenization. His work covers composites, polycrystalline metals (Mg, Ti alloys and Ni-based superalloys) and lattice and porous materials. The researcher has coauthored more than 90 papers in peer reviewed international journals, which have been cited 4000 times, with an h-factor of 31 (scopus). He has participated in more than 30 projects, European (Clean Skype and FET-open projects), national and regional, being principal investigator of 10 of them. He has directed 8 doctoral theses. He has held visiting scientist positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2010 and 2018) and at University of California Los Angeles (2018) as a Fulbright visiting scholar.

• Prof. Huseyin Sehitoglu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA.



Prof. Huseyin Sehitoglu received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from The City University, London in 1979 (First Class Honors) and went on to receive his M.S. in 1981 and his Ph.D in 1983 in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He served as Director of Mechanics and Materials for the National Science Foundation from 1991-1993. He was the Head of the newly formed Mechanical Science and Engineering Department during 2004-2009. He heads the Fracture Control Program at the University of Illinois and is currently involved with NSF, Air Force, DOE, Rolls Royce and Honeywell funded research. His major areas of focus are Mechanics of Materials, Thermo-mechanical Behavior of Metals, Phase Transformations and Shape Memory, and Twinning and Slip in Metallic Materials. Professor Sehitoglu has significantly advanced scholarship related to thermomechanical fatigue, fatigue crack closure, stress-induced phase transformations, cyclic ratcheting plasticity, slip and twinning in metals.

Technical Programme

• Download the IWPDF 2021 Live Session Programme here.
• Download the IWPDF 2021 Book of Abstracts here.

1st International Workshop on Plasticity, Damage and Fracture of Engineering Materials, 22-23 August 2019, Ankara, TURKEY

Conference Co-Chairs

• Cihan Tekoğlu
  Department of Mechanical Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey ( c.tekoglu[at]gmail.com)
• Tuncay Yalçinkaya
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey ( yalcinka[at]metu.edu.tr)

Organizing Committee

• Hüsnü Dal
  Department of Mechanical Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
• Mert Efe
  Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
• Ercan Gürses
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
• Cihan Tekoğlu
  Department of Mechanical Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey
• Tuncay Yalçinkaya
  Department of Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Scientific Committee

• Farid Abed-Meraim, Arts et Métiers ParisTech (France)
• Majid R. Ayatollahi, Iran University of Science and Technology (Iran)
• Can Ayas, Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)
• C. Can Aydinder, Bogazici University (Turkey)
• Lorenzo Bardella, Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
• Laurence Brassart, Monash University (Australia)
• Zeljko Bozic, University of Zagreb (Croatia)
• Alan Cocks, University of Oxford (UK)
• Demirkan Coker, Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
• Eralp Demir, Sabanci University (Turkey)
• Mehmet Dördüncü, Erciyes University (Turkey)
• Serdar Goktepe, Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
• Johan Hoefnagels, Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands)
• Francesco Iacoviello, Università degli studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale (Italy)
• Kaan Inal, University of Waterloo (Canada)
• Ali Javili, Bilkent University (Turkey)
• Benjamin Klusemann, Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany)
• Giovanni Lancioni, Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy)
• Łukasz Madej, AGH University of Science and Technology (Poland)
• Lorenzo Malerba, CIEMAT (Spain)
• Hiroyuki Miyamoto, Doshisha University (Japan)
• David Morin, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology (Norway)
• Phu Nguyen, Monash University (Australia)
• Kim Lau Nielsen, Technical University of Denmark (Denmark)
• Izzet Özdemir, Izmir Institute of Technology (Turkey)
• Emilio Martínez Pañeda, Cambridge University (UK)
• Thomas Pardoen, Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium)
• Semih Perdahcioglu, University of Twente (The Netherlands)
• Minh-Son Pham, Imperial College London (UK)
• Daniel Rittel, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
• David Rodney, University of Lyon (France)
• Stefan Sandfeld, TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany)
• Maxime Sauzay, CEA SACLAY (France)
• Alexandar Sedmak, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
• Huseyin Sehitoglu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US)
• Igor Simonovski, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (The Netherlands)
• Celal Soyarslan, University of Wuppertal (Germany)
• Stanisław Stupkiewicz, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
• Cem Tasan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
• Dmitry Terentyev, SCK•CEN (Belgium)
• Ton Van Den Boogaard, University of Twente (The Netherlands)
• Motohiro Yuasa, Doshisha University (Japan)

Invited Lecturers

• Prof. Majid Reza Ayatollahi, Iran University of Science & Technology, Iran.



Dr. Majid R. Ayatollahi (PhD, University of Bristol, 1998) is distinguished professor and director of fatigue and fracture research laboratory in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology. His main fields of interest are fracture mechanics, and experimental and computational solid mechanics. Professor Ayatollahi is the author of the book titled "Characterization of Carbon Nanotube-Based Composites Under Consideration of Defects". He has published more than 200 refereed papers in well-known international (ISI) journals. He is a member of the editorial boards for seven international journals. Professor Ayatollahi received a prestigious award as "National Distinguished Professor" in 2014 from the Iranian ministry of science, research and technology, which is a highly competitive award in Iran. His research lab is in collaboration with several renowned European and East Asian institutions. He has been invited as keynote speaker in several international conferences and universities.

• Prof. Laurence Brassart, University of Oxford, UK.



Laurence Brassart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science at University of Oxford. She received her Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Louvain (Belgium) in 2007, and her PhD in Engineering Sciences from the same university in 2011. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the University of Louvain, before joining Monash University in 2015, where she has worked as a Senior Lecturer till recently till August 2019. Dr Brassart's research focuses on the development of physics-based mechanical models of materials at various length scales, with emphasis on multiscale and multiphysics approaches. Her current work mainly focuses on material systems that involve a strong coupling between mechanics and chemistry, for example in the context of energy materials and soft materials.

• Prof. Johan Hoefnagels, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.



Johan Hoefnagels is an Associate Professor in the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) group Mechanics of Materials at Mechanical Engineering, following his earlier background in applied plasma physics and advanced optical diagnostics. His current research focuses on experimental micromechanics of ‘thin films and interfaces’, by studying the systems’ micro-mechanics through integration of mechanical-microscopic characterization of underlying micro-mechanisms, such as damage and fracture, and integrate coupling of numerical simulations to experimental procedures. Topics of particular interest include delamination, ductile damage, size effects, flexible and stretchable electronics and MEMS. One of Johan’s research projects involves investigating a revolutionary mechanism to make electronics extremely stretchable and demonstrating this by means of an inflatable, in-vivo ultrasound detector, for which the first key step has been achieved: a free-standing interconnect has been designed that can be elastically stretched beyond 2000% and cyclically stretched at 1000% for over 10 million times.

• Prof. David Morin, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.



David Morin is an associate professor in Structural Engineering at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD degree in 2010 from the University of Valenciennes in France. His research interests are linked to the modelling of failure in materials, joints and structures with a special emphasis on aluminium alloys. He was the head of the research programme Connectors and Joints at the centre for research-based innovation CRI-SIMLab from 2012 to 2014. He is now the head of the research programme Structural Joints of the centre for research-based innovation SFI-CASA (https://www.ntnu.edu/web/casa) 2015-2023. Since 2010, he has been extensively involved in the relationship with the industrial partners of both CRI-SIMLab and SFI-CASA with a special focus on the transfer of technology from a research environment to an industrial context. In addition to his contribution to SFI-CASA, David Morin is also collaborating in other research projects, ALLDESIGN (https://www.researchgate.net/project/Rational-Alloy-Design-ALLDESIGN) and FractAL (https://www.ntnu.edu/kt/fractal) both dealing with multi-scale modelling of aluminium alloys.

• Prof. Thomas Pardoen, Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium.



Thomas Pardoen is full professor and President of the Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering (iMMC) at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL). He is also a member of the Research Center in Micro and Nanoscopic Materials and Electronic Devices (CERMIN) and of the Research Center in Architectured and Composite Materials (ARCOMAT) at UCL. Outside UCL, he is the Chair of the Scientific Council of the Belgian Nuclear Research Center SCK•CEN. He was Chairman of the board of the Research Center CERTECH from 2013 to 2016. He did his engineering studies (1994) and his Ph. D. (1998) at UCL, where he also got a master in philosophy (1996), and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University before returning to UCL in 2000 as faculty member. He is a member of the EUROMECH, MRS and ASME societies. His research interests span the area of the nano-, micro- and macro- mechanics of materials and systems, with an emphasis on multiscale experimental investigations and modelling of deformation and fracture phenomena, as well as coupled functional-mechanical properties and irradiation effects, from both fundamental and applied perspectives. His research activity is articulated around the mechanics of three classes of materials: (i) composites, hybrids, multimaterials, and adhesives, (ii) thin films, coatings and mems, (iii) high performance metallic alloys. He has supervised ~40 Ph. D. students, with 28 thesis accomplished, and ~20 post docs. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of J. Mech. Phys. Solids, Engng. Fract. Mech and Int. J. Damage Mech. He has published over 200 papers in peer reviewed international journals. He received the Grand Prix Alcan of the French academy of sciences in 2011 and a Francqui Chair from Université de Liège in 2015. He has been nominated Euromech Fellow in 2015.

• Prof. Cem Tasan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US.



Professor Tasan explores the boundaries of physical metallurgy, solid mechanics, and in-situ microscopy, in order to provide game-changing materials solutions to environmental challenges. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanics of Materials from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Following postdoctoral work at Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Germany, he was appointed as a Group Leader, leading the Adaptive Structural Materials group until joining MIT in 2016. His group at MIT mainly focuses on developing high resolution multi-field mapping methods; employing these methods to improve the physical understanding of the underlying transformation, deformation, damage and resetting mechanisms in nanostructured alloys; creating damage-resistant and/or resettable alloy design concepts based on this improved understanding.

Technical Programme

• Download the IWPDF 2019 Technical Programme here.
• Please, note that the programme is subject to changes. If you have special requests for the schedule of your talk please contact Dr. Yalcinkaya.
• Download the IWPDF 2019 Poster Schedule here.
• Download the IWPDF 2019 Book of Abstracts here.

A social trip to Cappadocia was organized

Cappadocia (A world heritage site) is a historical region in Central Anatolia, largely in the Nevşehir, Kayseri, Kırşehir, Aksaray, and Niğde Provinces in Turkey. It is a popular tourist destination, as has many areas with unique geological, historic, and cultural features.

Ancient volcanic eruptions blanketed this region with thick ash, which solidified into a soft rock—called tuff—tens of meters thick. Wind and water went to work on this plateau, leaving only its harder elements behind to form a fairy tale landscape of cones, pillars, pinnacles, mushrooms, and chimneys, which stretch as far as 130 feet (40 meters) into the sky.

But human hands performed equally incredible works here. The rocky wonderland is honeycombed with a network of human-created caves; living quarters, places of worship, stables, and storehouses were all dug into the soft stone. In fact, tunnel complexes formed entire towns with as many as eight different stories hidden underground.

The site became a religious refuge during the early days of Christianity. By the fourth century Christians fleeing Rome’s persecution had arrived in some numbers and established monastic communities here. The monks excavated extensive dwellings and monasteries and created Byzantine frescoed paintings in cave chapels beginning in the seventh century, which endure in well-preserved isolation to this day.

Göreme is rich with history, but not all of Cappadocia’s troglodyte dwellings are museums. Some still serve as homes and others as hotels, which offer a truly unique hospitality experience.

The most important towns and destinations in Cappadocia are Ürgüp, Göreme, Ihlara Valley, Selime, Guzelyurt, Uçhisar, Avanos and Zelve. Among the most visited underground cities are Derinkuyu, Kaymakli, Gaziemir and Ozkonak. The best historic mansions and cave houses for tourist stays are in Ürgüp, Göreme, Guzelyurt and Uçhisar. Hot-air ballooning is very popular in Cappadocia and is available in Göreme. Trekking is enjoyed in Ihlara Valley, Monastery Valley (Guzelyurt), Ürgüp and Göreme.

Pictures from IWPDF 2019