From well before dawn—when the muezzin’s first ululations echo across the rooftops of the Turkish village of Gí¶reme—to the last call to prayer each evening, the day’s passage is marked by this admonition: “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”) The amplified message sets the town’s dogs barking and sends the pigeons aloft. It caroms off the monumental stone hoodoos that punctuate this World Heritage Site, reminding visitors that they’ve entered a place where nature is surreal and faith has had a long history of competing voices.

The Gí¶reme Valley of Cappadocia, a region in central Turkey, contains one of Earth’s most unusual landscapes. Thousands of gigantic, conical hoodoos—many of which resemble Ku Klux Klan headgear—protrude from the valley’s floor, where mattock-wielding farmers toil amid their vineyards. In early May, daisies bloom by the millions, and the air is redolent with apple and walnut blossoms. For millenniums, these pinnacles have served as labyrinthine, high-rise homes, with families burrowing into the 10- to 50-metre-high natural stone towers, and excavating interior rooms, furniture, stairs, and windows from the soft volcanic rock.

Early Christians, following in the footsteps of first-century AD proselytizer Saint Paul, began arriving in Cappadocia and found in the region’s eroded cliffs and towers perfect sites to maintain a monastic life, far removed from the worldly temptations below. Six hundred of the hoodoos became, in time, Christian churches, with interior walls painted in medieval frescoes of biblical scenes. When Islam began asserting its prerogatives in the eighth century AD, the Christians of Cappadocia started burrowing underground. They hollowed out at least 36 subterranean cities in the region, capable of concealing populations of thousands from intruders. Tides of conquerors came and went. In the end, Islam remained.

I explored the valley in the company of Oruí§ Celik, 52, who grew up in Cappadocia and has seen the changes produced by time. Today, fewer than 20 families still occupy hoodoo houses in Gí¶reme, he tells me, as people like him choose the comforts of running water, electricity, and insulation over the rustic charm of claustrophobic, dung-heated caves. (Many tourists choose to stay in the village’s refurbished cave hotels.) The real attraction of Gí¶reme is, however, the extraordinary terrain, and the evidence of history that permeates the region.

For seven kilometres, the Sword Trail heads northeast from Gí¶reme along the Meskendir Valley to the village of Çavusin. Eroded cliffs above the dry riverbed feature scores of “fairy chimneys”, as locals call the hoodoos, each with vertical faí§ades perforated with dozens of openings. Those at ground level were once stables, while those higher up—reached in earlier times, it appears, by ladders—were doorways. In many cases, the doorways are now plugged with cinder blocks so that the valley’s fertilizer-producing pigeons can enter through small holes and use the former cave homes as dovecotes. Elsewhere, the hoodoo chapels and churches—their interiors sooty with centuries of candle smoke—reveal fragments of their original purpose. Frescoes of Jesus and his disciples have, literally, been defaced. Only halos remain. And centuries of graffiti have rendered the walls’ illustrated biblical stories a palimpsest of inscribed revisions: words upon words, with a ghostly John the Baptist or Virgin Mary peering from beneath.

From the trail’s ridgelines, as I approach Çavusin, I look down onto scenes of Brueghel-esque activity: here a couple, stooped with age and effort, weed beneath their blossoming walnut trees; there a tractor-driving farmer harrows the soil while several scarved and pantaloon-clad women follow, hand-casting seeds into furrows. People lean on their mattocks and nod—the Turks are unceasingly friendly—as the passerby moves on. But when I pause, I hear regularly from people living there that, in the face of global warming, the wells and rivers of Cappadocia are drying up, there’s little future in farming here, and the young are departing in hopes of finding work elsewhere. In this Eden-like, daisy-filled landscape, modernity and the search for money are bringing about the end of rural life.

When I raise the issue of modernity with Recep Belada, the imam of a mosque in nearby Nevsehir, he makes a point that is, I know from travels in the Middle East, reiterated often across the Islamic world. It’s not modernity itself that worries him, but the out-of-control western materialism that almost inevitably accompanies it. “Here,” he says, gesturing, “I have a child, a wife, a home, food. It’s enough. But where people are not content, there’s never enough. If a man has 100 kilos of gold, he wants 200. If 200, he wants 300.”

“Materialism is our God,” I say.

“Yes!” he replies emphatically.

Five times a day, Belada crosses the street to his mosque, stands before the loudspeakers’ microphone, and commences his minaret-launched call to prayer: “Allahu akbar!” Old people come, out of respect for Allah, he tells me. But the young, well”¦they are all moving away.

Access: It’s a two-hour flight from Istanbul to Nevsehir, the closest airport to the Gí¶reme Valley. Buses also run daily from Istanbul to Gí¶reme, a journey that takes about 12 hours. The town is backpacker-oriented and full of inexpensive pensions that cost about $20 to $40 per night. The region is crisscrossed with hiking/mountain biking/horseback riding trails; guides, tours, and rentals can be found in the Gí¶reme village square.