Dust of Ages
Entrance into the Labyrinth
Sometimes it feels like monasteries were built not for God, but to hide from His gaze. Selime is not a building — it’s a trace of contact with light. A rock scorched by faith, but never sanctified by it.
No one prays here — the algorithm of time has recorded its bug in the stone, and now the air quietly repeats it like a mantra. You step inside — and feel that you’ve entered an archive where backup copies of souls are kept.
Past Empires
Selime grew out of tuff, soft as memory. Once, a caravan route passed here — Byzantines, Arabs, Armenians, Seljuks, Hittites. Each empire left a layer, like sediment in a cup, and the Cappadocian wind carefully stirred that tea.
The monastery was carved into the rock not for beauty, but to conceal the uncertainty of existence. Cave cells, smoke shafts, stairways leading upward to the sky — and back to nowhere. They say the first monk here just wanted silence — and found a way to turn it into architecture.
Now silence is the main structure. Stone is only its shell.
Fragments of Now
No one lives in Selime today — they pass through it, as through the innards of an ancient creature. Stone domes resemble skulls of gods who got bored.
Cats sleep in the niches where icons once stood. The sun hits the cracks as if testing whether there’s still life inside.
Outside — buses, drones, guides with microphones; inside — the acoustics of eternity, amplified to a whisper. You climb the stairs upward, but it feels like you’re descending into your own memory.
Shadows on the Edge of the Mind
Selime is not a monastery — it’s an interface between stone and consciousness. When you stand in the main hall, lit only by a narrow beam, your brain briefly loses track of what’s “inside” and what’s “outside.”
The space seems to breathe through you. The monks didn’t pray here — they compiled light into stillness. And maybe the God they called upon was just a reflection of their own thoughts, bouncing endlessly off the walls.
Sometimes faith isn’t the search for the higher — it’s the attempt to synchronize with yourself.
How Did We Get There?
Getting here is easy, if you know where not to go.
The Monastery of Selime stands at the end of the Ihlara Valley — the last page of a stone book. From Nevşehir or Göreme, it’s about an hour’s drive. Better to come by evening, when the sun tilts low and the walls begin to glow from within.
Shoes — humble. Water — plenty. A flashlight — essential, if you want to look into the kind of darkness that doesn’t frighten but listens. And skip the tour. Selime can’t be explained — you have to burn through it with your gaze until you hear your own echo.
Echo in the Void
I stood on the edge of a cliff where the rock ended in sky. Below — a valley eroded by time to the bone. Above — traces of sunlight, no longer light, but memory of it. And suddenly I realized: everything humans build is an attempt to negotiate with the void.
Selime replies not with words, but with reflection. You speak to the rock — it sends back not sound, but thought, slightly changed, purified. And if you listen carefully, maybe that’s the prayer.
Not to God. To yourself — the one who has survived everything.
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