Uçhisar · Cappadocia, Türkiye
Museum Hotel
Cave suites, Roman columns and a sky full of balloons. A hotel where you sleep inside the history of Cappadocia.
Cave suites, Roman columns and a sky full of balloons. A hotel where you sleep inside the history of Cappadocia.
Every morning in Cappadocia begins the same way. Before sunrise, the burners roar in the valleys below, and one by one, more than a hundred hot air balloons lift over the fairy chimneys. From the terraces of Museum Hotel, high on the slopes of Uçhisar, they rise level with your coffee cup.
This is the only hotel in Cappadocia that is part of Relais & Châteaux, and it holds two Michelin Keys. It was built into ancient caves and old stone houses, which were inhabited, in turn, by Hittites, Persians, Romans, Seljuks and Ottomans. Each of those civilisations left something behind, and much of it is on display here.
The name is meant literally. Roman columns stand in the garden. Ancient amphorae rest in niches carved from the rock. Display cases hold jewellery, textiles and objects from the Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman worlds, and Ottoman furniture and tapestries fill the rooms, so that a walk to breakfast becomes a walk through two thousand years.
Unlike in a museum, nothing here is roped off. You can sit beside it, eat beside it and sleep beside it.
Cappadocia's soft volcanic stone has been carved into homes, chapels and storerooms for thousands of years. Museum Hotel kept the caves and their shapes, the niches, the arches and the curved ceilings worn smooth by hand, and restored the old stone houses around them. Then it filled them with the things that belong there.
The balloons are the reason most people come to Cappadocia, and there are few better places to watch them. From the infinity pool, they drift so close that you can hear the burners. Order breakfast on the terrace and they pass overhead in their dozens, gold against a pale pink sky.
No two rooms are alike. Some are true caves, with sculpted walls, arched alcoves and windows cut through the rock to frame the valley. Others are in restored stone mansions, with high wooden ceilings, Ottoman antiques and rows of arched windows looking out across Pigeon Valley, Love Valley and the Red Valley toward Mount Erciyes.
The most remarkable suites have their own indoor pools, set under vaulted stone and lit by stained glass and candlelight. Some bathrooms hold tubs carved from glowing onyx, set in front of a window onto the valley. The Michelin Guide described the pool suites as "private underground stone mansions", and that is exactly what they feel like.
When the day-trippers leave, Uçhisar grows quiet. The outdoor pool lights up turquoise beneath the old stone arches, lanterns glow along the terraces, and the lights of the villages spread out below. In winter the snow settles on the stone and the heated pool steams in the cold air, and the hotel becomes even more magical.
Lil'a, the hotel's restaurant, is recommended by the Michelin Guide for its classic and modern takes on regional cuisine. Candles flicker against old stone and tapestries, meat is cooked over open fire, and the kitchen leans on the produce of the Anatolian plateau and the hotel's own gardens. Below ground, a brick-vaulted wine cellar holds Cappadocian vintages, as this is one of the oldest winemaking regions in the world.
The hamam is domed in carved stone, with a copper basin at its centre, and treatment rooms look out through arched windows across the valley. Old customs are kept alive in smaller ways too: on the terrace, a barber in a fez offers a traditional Turkish shave with the whole of Cappadocia as a backdrop.
The gardens have residents of their own. Peacocks fan their tails among the fruit trees, tortoises sun themselves on the warm stone at the edge of a mosaic pool, and white doves gather on fragments of ancient columns. On clear days, the snow-capped summit of Mount Erciyes, the volcano whose ash formed this landscape, floats on the horizon beyond the infinity pool.
Few settings rival it for a wedding: an aisle laid out on a ridge of pale volcanic rock, the valleys dropping away on every side, and dinner afterwards beneath the stone arches. The hotel's team arranges ceremonies, private dinners and celebrations of every size.
