This Is This

19. In Cappadocia
Map

We ate breakfast in the courtyard in the cool of the morning. We sat under the cloudless sky on cushions in front of the low table. We had rose jam on fresh bread with mint tea. We sat and talked about previous travels with the other French guests.

After breakfast I had a shower and dressed into some clean clothes. Despite the heat, I wore jeans to comply to conformity.

Our guide was Hacim, a twenty-three year old Turk who spoke French. We packed our cameras and bottles of water and he took us across the street to a white van driven by a man who only spoke Turkish. He had broad shoulders and was solidly built and smartly dressed. He barely spoke, whereas Hacim never stopped talking.

Hacim was a joker. He kept telling gags and stories about women who had hired him as a guide. Half of them couldn’t have been true. It was hard getting him to talk about Cappadocia at first. The van tore along a narrow paved road through the plains, through stunning valleys and around cliffsides and foothills.

The only other cars on the road were like pick-up trucks, with women in the back being driven out, by men, to work in the fields. We passed these every ten minutes; most of the women had been in working since the early morning.

Children splashed each other as they cooled off in irrigation tanks. It was beginning to get hot. The kids would always wave frantically as we sped by and we would always wave back. The women would wave if there were no men around, and the men would wave if there was no one else around.

Along the way, we passed about six women on their donkeys, the saddles of which were loaded with some of that day’s harvest which they would sell in the village. This would be bought by the baker, who sold the bread in town to the shops, who sold it to the people, most of whom seemed to work in the fields.

The first stop was a volcanic hill. The Cappadocia region, Hacim told us, is dominated by Erciyes Dagi. Millions of years ago, the mountain erupted, covering hundreds of surrounding miles with lava in what must have been one of the greatest convulsions on Earth. The elements sawed away at the lava over the years that followed, creating deep valleys and fissures, turning slopes into cones and columns. Although the white dust from the rocks looks like sand, it is much more fertile than the soil of the surrounding Central Anatolian steppelands.

The region’s first inhabitants discovered that the stone of the rock valleys is as magical as it looks. It is soft until it comes into contact with the air, making it a perfect medium for carving entire buildings sculpted out of living rock. Generations of local people have carved innumerable doorways and rooms into the hillside walls across several hundred square miles. Some were homes for farmers, others were stables. Many were used as chapels, cells of refectories for monks and hermits. There are an estimated three thousand rock churches in the area and new caves and underground cities are still being discovered. Some locals still live in the rock formations, which are cool in the summer. The result of this phenomenon is an incredible, naturally sculpted landscape.

At the top of one volcanic hill we could see the surrounding miles of knolls and mounts looking out over the flat plains and fertile wheat fields.

Our next stop was Nazakoy. We drove along dirt tracks to the village which could not have been home to more than one hundred people, if that. Mule dung mixed with hay was shaped into disks and lay on the flat roofs of the huts to dry. Because there was little wood in the barren area, this was used as fuel for cooking.

The inhabitants discovered an underground city under the town in 1957. The find has since been crudely excavated and is dimly lit by bare light bulbs. The city was once home to more than a thousand Christians in the days of the Byzantine Empire, but due to their persecution, they dug in and lived in the dugouts for more than a century.

The city contains a chapel, kitchens, a cemetery, bedrooms, communal rooms, store rooms, and has five floors, all of which are connected by an  intricate tunnel system. As I crawled, walked, and climbed through the metropolis, I wondered how it must have been to live a lifetime down there. Then again I wondered what it would be like to live a lifetime anywhere.

It was a relief not to see any tourists or even archaeologists at the sight. We returned to the van and began talking in a mixture of French, English, German, Turkish, and sign language to the inhabitants. A few people spoke a little German because Turkish provided a valuable source of cheap labour the European country.

One man pointed to my camera. I held it out to him. He took it and admired it. He handed it back and asked how much it had cost me. I translated it into Turkish lira and told him. He went quiet. We said goodbye and set back on the road.

Wondering why my answer put such a damper on things, I asked Hacim what the local monthly wage was out here. He said seventy pounds maximum. I had informed the man that the object swinging around my neck cost three times what he made in a month.

We spent the next two hours on foot, walking to Christian churches built into the rock, dating back to the Byzantine days. Hacim was doing his best to be an interesting guide, but the heat aggravated our thirst and the walking aggravated fatigue and hunger. After an hour we walked to a larger  village. We plodded through its dusty streets, past donkeys sleeping in the shade of mud huts, to a restaurant.

I had a beer and a typically Turkish lunch. The beer went down a dream. It was cold but not to cold to drink and was not too fizzy. I finished the lunch with a local speciality of goat’s yoghurt and honey. It wasn’t as unappetising as it may sound. It was a bit sour, but the honey alleviated the bitter taste.

We took the bus to another church with a freezing well outside full of delicious water. We filled our bottles and explored the old church, which was thus far the biggest we had seen. Behind the building, I found a cave full of bats. The  French word for bat, “chauve-souris”, literally means bald mouse, which is kind of what they looked like. They were agitated by our presence, so we took pictures and headed back to the van.

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