The remote Soğanlı Valley in Cappadocia, Turkey began to be inhabited by Byzantine monks in the 5th or 6th centuries, but most of the valley's churches were built between AD 900 and 1000. The modern 20th century village is also abandoned. Under government orders, people are not allowed to live here after a boulder the size of a house has felt down from a nearby cliff.
St. Barbara Church was built in the 5th or 6th century. It contains the best frescoes in the Soğanlı Valley. It is the only church in Cappadocia that contains an old legend known among early Christians, the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. A group of seven youths hid in a cave outside the city of Ephesus around AD 250 to escape Roman persecutions of Christians. They woke up 300 years later in a completely different, Christianized world.
The common feature of all churches to Cappadocia, is the lack of the external architecture. When hiking it is hard to find a church, because it is only marked by a narrow opening in the natural rock. The Domed Church in Soğanlı Valley is unique because it was the only cave church in Cappadocia with carved and painted dome on the outside.
