Cappadocia Articles
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RISING ABOVE THE FRAY IN THE LAND OF FAIRY CHIMNEYS, CAVES AND CHURCHES
Daily Telegraph, 7th April 2012
For all the famed fantasy landscaping – soaring buttes and outcrops, sudden caverns and arches – Pigeon Valley did not live up to its name. In pigeons – if only in them – Cappadocia’s top walking trail fell short. The old man who emerged from the valley bottom’s verdant patchwork of vineyards, orchards and vegetable plots to hand me a fistful of walnuts, a typical Turkish courtesy, had a ready explanation.
‘Not so long ago, all these pigeon houses were occupied,’ the man recalled. He gestured to the numerous empty niches artfully carved into the canyon’s steep sides. ‘The pigeons got the grain we put out for them; their droppings were collected to fertilize the fields. These days, though, most of us are too busy dealing with others to worry about such things.’ He waved a nut-stained hand down the valley towards Göreme, the booming tourist town set among the soft tufa protuberances – the so-called ‘fairy chimneys’ – that are the signature feature of this volcanic wonderland in Central Turkey.
So the traditional farming communities which once kept Cappadocia’s pigeons in style – not only feeding them and removing their guano but decorating their rock-hewn cotes with kilim-style motifs painted in vegetable dyes – now pass their time providing roughly equivalent services to ever greater numbers of human visitors. This compact region, riddled with the rock-hewn interiors of Byzantine frescoed churches and monastery complexes, scattered dwellings and warren-like ‘underground cities’, has been seeing an explosion of cultural interest in recent years.
The new pulling power derives in part from this World Heritage region’s recent emergence as a top ballooning centre. Nothing corrects the complaint some have been known to make – that the standard Cappadocian itinerary can overdo underground – quite like an aerial excursion across these landscapes of house-high meringues and mushrooms, wigwams and willies, especially in the rose-tinted light of dawn. It may just be that the true clincher, however, is the dramatic transformation in the hotels on offer (see box), confirming Cappadocia as the stand-out accommodation oasis in all the Turkish interior – and across the wider region east as far even as India.
Good news in terms of tourism receipts, no doubt, though those averse to crowds may join the pigeons in dissenting. On my arrival at Göreme’s Open Air Museum, the region’s top visitor site, I found banks of electronic turnstiles and newly opened café facilities. The queues and coaches outside this celebrated cluster of rock churches recalled high season in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. There was no prospect of seeing these tenth-century frescoed interiors – pointedly places of peaceful contemplation – at anything like their best.
No matter; Cappadocia boasts an astonishing profusion of alternative cultural sites – there are an estimated 3,000 churches alone across the region – many of which any independently-minded traveller should be able to reach. The noticeable lack of a comprehensive guidebook, that said, calls for a modicum of initiative; what I did was ask in the tour agencies, invariably staffed with helpful English speakers, for a church I might have to myself, and a fine walk to lead me there. Out of the torrent of ready suggestions the one at Pancarlık caught my fancy. From the town of Ortahisar, huddled beneath a high outcrop of honeycombed rock, I set out on foot along the shaded Balkan Valley.
I passed the same other-worldly pigeon cotes and orchards, poplar stands and pumpkin plots to reach a rusty sign to Pancarlık Church. Beyond the ramshackle ticket booth and a snoring attendant I found the quintessential Cappadocian site; remote, empty and lovely. Through the arched doorway spilled the exuberant blues and greens of the church’s exceptional frescoes, a moving panoply of naively rendered Biblical scenes. The interior was partially furnished with chairs and carpets, candle stubs and dried flowers, as if the original mystery of this place could still stir old instincts in its visitors.
I similarly avoided the best-known ‘underground cities’ at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı where even modest visitor numbers were known to choke the narrow tunnels. Instead I made for the scruffy little farming village of Mazıköy which lay beyond the region’s heartlands – the clustered visitor centres of Göreme, Uçhisar and Ürgüp – on the treeless plateau to the south. It proved an inspired manoeuvre. In the temporary absence of Mazıköy’s current caretaker a young boy was dispatched to summon the former one, elderly Mustafa, who arrived out of a long retirement eagerly bashing a beam of light from his failing torch. He led me down a tunnel into an underground realm complete with hewn chimneys, shrines, sleeping chambers, threshing floors, wine presses, and huge circular stones used for sealing off the entrances in the event of attack. It was to bastions like this that the population had once retreated whenever the region was overrun, which was often, and at Mustafa’s words I could almost feel the thundering hooves of Saracen or Mongol raiders passing overhead.
I stopped off at Keşlik Monastery where the various churches, chapels, granaries and refectories faithfully replicated the load-bearing pillars, arches and domes of their free-standing equivalents. At this enchanting spot the local caretaker, Cabir, had taken it upon himself to tend the old monastery orchards. I was content to sit beneath the overhanging quinces, vines and apples, the more so when Cabir brought me tea. It turned out that the tea was as free as the chat, as it often is in Turkey; it came with the 4 lira (£1.50) entrance ticket, explained Cabir, when I tried to pay for the several glasses I had downed.
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INNER VISIONS
Conde Nast Traveller, Jan 2004
Inland Turkey’s volcanic landscape was originally sculpted by the elements. But for 1,000 years the soft rock has been carved to create dwellings, churches – and now some attractive hotels. Jeremy Seal wanders and wonders.
It came early in the trip – the question that could not be ducked – from a pideci, or cook of Turkish pizza, in the town of Hacibektas.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked.
Sweat-warped from a life bent over a hot wood oven, he raised himself to his full height with a curious cracking sound, like sprung veneer, then leaned on his pide-removing paddle, intent on our answer, as if he had got us with that one. As well he might, it being late November in Anatolia, with a freezing rain muddying the streets of a town whose one attraction – Hacibektas is strictly a one-attraction town – seemed to have closed for an indefinitely extended lunch break. Which left us to seek refuge in a nondescript pide shop, comprehensively exposed to what seemed like a perilously good question.
Paris in the spring, summer by the sea, Vermont in the fall, Anatolia in the winter; it’s not hard to see where this particular wish list collapses, leaving the last item to evoke a stubble-covered steppe broken only by lines of mud-splattered poplars and the occasional minaret or cement factory, with a cruel wind blowing from Tartary or the Crimea. The Turkish interior, even in kinder seasons, is more likely to be commended for the landscape’s demonic beauty, the sheer remnant abundance of antique civilizations and for the overwhelming good nature of the people than to be applauded for its comfort, with no sign of the attractive and individual small hotels that have increasingly sprung up along the country’s rapidly developing tourist coasts.
Except in Cappadocia.
Cappadocia may lie at Turkey’s geographical dead centre, a four-hour drive southeast of the capital Ankara, but what goes here is as far from the surrounding steppe norm as the region’s weird, world-renowned geology. Where you’re unlikely to be served anything stronger than black tea in much of Central Turkey, Cappadocia boasts an enthusiastic wine industry (though an admittedly unexceptional one; quaffable about covers it). On this intensely conservative plateau, Cappadocia can seem like an oasis of cultural enlightenment. It speaks volumes for Cappadocia that chief among its local heroes is the unlikely figure of the town of Urgup’s former library director – now in his 80s and with a street named only recently in his honour – who was a man with a pioneering mission back in the 1940s, arranging for books to be circulated among the area’s remote villages by donkey; the librarians that accompanied the donkeys during the winter carried guns to ward off the wolves.
People have been escaping the steppe to this volcano-girt region for over a thousand years. One hundred-foot layers of lava, or tuff, have been sculpted by the elements – the process, naturally, has taken a while – to forms of outrageous fancy which turn pink – what else could they do? – in the evening light; these spires and stooks, wigwams, shafts and turrets which the Turks collectively know as fairy chimneys have often been hollowed into singular homes and storehouses. Early Christians also worked the pliant stone into extensive burrows, or underground cities as they are known, where communities took refuge from passing hordes. More recently, the place thrived as an essential stop-off on the overland trail east, the unquestionably phallic look that sometimes comes over the landscapes and the concentration of rock-carved churches combining, as it were, to refuel 1970s free-love mystics in mid-flight on their way to India. Increasingly, however, visitors are drawn to the region by its hotels –for individuality and imaginativeness, the pick by a lengthy street throughout inland Turkey.
‘There have been winter visitors, particularly the Japanese, to Cappadocia for decades,’ explained Ankara-based guide Okan Ertas, who was visiting with a group of American tourists at the time of our stay. ‘The best thing about Cappadocia in the winter used to be having the visitor sights to yourself; now it’s the hotels which people particularly seem to appreciate.’ Not that it was always thus; ten years back, the rather more limited choice was between the hotels favoured by the large tour groups – the unprepossessing bed factories on the outskirts of Urgup – or the homely but decidedly basic pansiyons (with names like the Flintstones) in Goreme’s rock caves.
In the early 1990s,however, hotels like Goreme’s Ataman, a restored Greek merchant’s house, part stone-built, part rock-hewn, provided the blueprint for an entirely revised notion of Cappadocian accommodation and pioneered a welcome rash of individual, chic and emphatically comfortable small hotels that blended notably into the landscape – primarily by being literally built in it rather than on it. They have since proved to boast another asset, the stone interiors proving not only cool in the hot summers but also warm and cosy, with open fireplaces rather than the standard Turkish stoves, in the frequently merciless winters. There are now some ten such hotels scattered between Urgup’s Esbelli district and in the villages of Goreme, Uchisar, Mustafapasa and Avyali, with a notable new one in Goreme slated for opening next year. With the majority of them open all year, Cappadocia is beginning to be appreciated both by foreigners and by Turkey’s growing westernized elite as the country’s leading winter resort, offering cosy accommodation, an abundance of cultural sights, exceptional walking and even basic nearby skiing all at once.
Nor did the weather worry us for long. Cappadocia lies at about 1200 metres, or 4,000 feet, so it came as no surprise when the rain turned to snow on our second day, with a brief dusting which outlined the folds of the meringue-shaped rocks and turned high ledges on the fairy chimneys into white cornices and architraves. A succession of bright, still days followed. Cappadocia gets alot of this weather during the winter – 70% of the time, as frequent visitor Okan Ertas estimated.
Which, to answer the pideci’s question, was what we had hoped for all along; perfect conditions for exploring the area’s underground cities, monasteries and churches, villages and caravanserais, combined with the low-season bonus of having to ourselves the likes of the so-called Open Air Museum, the concentration of rock-hewn churches outside Goreme, which is mobbed between May and September. It was typical of our stay that we were the only visitors – there would be a total of just six that day – at the underground city at Ozkonak. An elderly man stood outside a single souvenir shop, and invited us to drink tea. Latif Acer, the village imam until his retirement three months ago (and now tending his son Lutfullah’s optimistically open shop), pointed at the entrance to the nearby underground city and explained how he had found it in the early 1970s. ‘I was watering my father’s vegetables,’ explained Latif. ‘The water was disappearing into the ground strangely fast. I dug a bit, and soon uncovered the passageway.’ Lutfullah showed us around his father’s famous discovery; just four of the original ten storeys have been opened to the public but these, with their chambers and winepresses, descending passageways and great circular stones for sealing sections off against attack, give unique insights into the remarkably organized lives of these people who went troglodytic for years at a time.
In the days that followed, we visited the rock monastery at Eski Gumus, with its high-sided hidden courtyard and its largely undamaged frescoes, some of the best in Cappadocia. We also took in Avanos, on the Kizilirmak (Red River), and paid a visit to this pottery town’s quirky resident, Galip, who keeps beyond his array of pottery galleries a trophy collection of arresting peculiarity; the walls and ceilings of one cave chamber, completely covered with some 20,000 address cards from which locks of hair hang. Over the years, Galip has persuaded many of his customers, but only his female ones, to contribute to his ‘hair museum’, and when asked what caused him to do it – the place has a compelling air of obsession and fetishism – Galip merely answered, ‘Why not?’ and made a present of one of his plates to us.
Then there was the walking. Cappadocia sees a lot of laced boots and daypacks during the season; in these enchanted conditions, we hardly met anybody in the area’s tended valleys and giddying gorges. One day, we drove out past the water meadows at Gulagac, ice-skeined now, where every poplar seemed to host a resident eagle, en route to walking the Ihlara river valley, a steep-sided canyon littered with rock churches running off the northern slopes of Mt Melendiz. On another, we left the car at the village of Cavusin, and followed a way-marked path up Gulludere, or the Rose Valley, until we noticed a solitary local converging on us. He carried a bucket and two sticks bound together for length, and there was something of the angler about him, but an angler out of Beckett, perhaps via Tolkein (ho hum; the trouble you can get into describing Cappadocia). He stopped beneath a tree – it was an oleaster or wild olive which the Turks call igde – and set about its branches with his stick, showering himself with falling fruit. Curious, we helped him gather them; they were indeed shaped like olives, but inside they were sweet and powdery. His wife, he told us, would make jelly from them. Beyond him lay frost-blurred quinces and apple trees hung heavy with globes of mistletoe, and spidery vines with coppery leaves that crunched to dust between the fingers. The path funneled into a riverbed where the stream had shaped the soft rock over the millennia so that we passed through great stretches of natural tunnel or beneath wave-shaped protuberances, pink in the late light. Above us, a slab of rock had fallen away to reveal the interior of a rock-carved church, its roof finely carved with stylised palm fronds and crosses. A fine dry snow began to fall, but by the time we returned to the car, the sky was lit up with stars.
The cold evenings regularly drove us to take refuge at the tourist-friendly hammam in Urgup which dated from Selcuk times but was unisex, an arrangement which is unheard of elsewhere in inland Turkey. We lay down among Italians on a marble slab beneath a dome holed with glass skylights. Afterwards, there was beer and the dried pumpkin seeds for which Urgup is famed in old leather chairs before the blazing hearth at the Prokopi bar; or salep, a memorable hot drink made from milk and the powdered root of an orchid, and topped with cinnamon, at one of the town’s pastry shops.
But back to the Hacibekas pide shop on our very first morning, when all this was in the future and for just a moment we indeed wondered what there was for us in a Cappadocian winter. I was stoic in my answer, mumbling to the cook that at least his pide was good (it was topped with mince, oregano and peppers, and was excellent). It was only later, once the town’s one attraction – the monastery complex of dervish leader Haci Bektas Veli – had reopened and the afternoon was drawing on, that the sky began to clear, with shreds of pale blue showing among the clouds; the bright still stuff was on its way, and we had our answer.
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