Day Ten: Beneath Cappadocia. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day ten of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.


In the shallow part of the late morning we pulled out of our hotel, setting out for the deeper parts of Cappadocia.  The cities fell away, and the English road signs, the tour groups, the restaurants, the ATV rentals were all replaced by irrigated farmland.

Time passed like it does on long drives.

“Slow down,” the guy in the passenger seat said all of a sudden.

“What is it?” the driver asked.  There were no other cars on the road.

“Slow down!” again, with more insistence, pointing ahead of us.

And then we saw it.  A huge flock of sheep taking up both lanes of the otherwise empty road.  We pulled over.  Bringing up the front of the flock was a sheep dog, its tongue happily lolling out of its mouth.  The sheep followed, their bells ringing with every trot, the full udders of the momma sheep swaying back and forth.  Th shepherd brought up the rear, with his crook hitting the asphalt step by step.  Following him was a second sheep dog, more dutifully drooping its muzzle to the ground, ready to urge on stragglers.

-&-

We descended into the underground city of Kaymakli, a complex cut eight floors deep into the soft volcanic rock.  Once it could have been home to over three thousand people.  Now the upper levels of this subterranean metropolis are used by locals for storage—a honeycombed ancient attic.  A portion of the city has been made safe for tourists.  The walls have been strung with lights, the sloping steps have been reinforced with concrete and steel, and almost every turn has been marked with helpful signs.

As soon as we went inside the heat of the day lifted, and we could smell damp stone.  The hand-carved walls were uneven, branching off to various rooms like the arms of a tree.  The corridors narrowed as they went deeper, until in some places you had to bend over to pass through them, or fall onto your hands and knees.  Hollowed out into the soft rock were storage rooms, wine presses, a church, living rooms, graves, and a metallurgist.

Deeper into the city, we marveled at a huge ventilation shaft.  It was about the size of a comfortable chair, and the left side of it was dotted with hand-and-footholds climbing all the way down.  We turned the flashlight into to the darkness, but the light got lost in the depths.  We had no idea how deep the shaft went, or how high.

And it stunned us to think that all of these sloping passageways and huge stone caverns were carved by people.  That someone had not only climbed this vertiginous ventilation shaft but excavated it from the living stone.  Ancient Christians had done the majority of the work here, retreating to the caves as a defense against persecution.  But the Christians had only expanded and improved on cave structures which had existed long before them, going as far back as the Hittites.  The caves were safe.  They were a good place to hide from the shifting tides of empire.

-&-

Our next stop was the gorge of Ihlara, a broad tree-filled gash in the rock whose sides were speckled with windows and rooms that once were the seclusion of early Christians.  Around eighty thousand people once lived here in lonesome safety, in four thousand houses carved into the sides of the rock, praying at over a hundred churches.

As we walked to the ticket office a large crowd of high-school girls burst through of the turnstiles.  The first group was dressed modestly in headscarfs, clucking softly to themselves.  One girl stopped at the gift shop and put on a cowboy hat over her hijab, laughing to her friends.  The next wave of young women were dressed in western fashion—in camisoles, skinny jeans and shorts.  I think they were from the same school, but they looked like they came from two different worlds.

We paid for our tickets and made our way down the three hundred steps to the bottom of the gorge.  The whole sky was cloudy.  The wind tasted of cloud, the far-off mountains behind us were capped by clouds, and the clear sunny heat we were used to was dulled by clouds.

We visited the Agacalti Church, which was caved into the cliff wall in the eleventh century, propped up with four arches, and decorated with a small dome.  The walls were frescoed in white and orange paint, with the robes of the prophets drawn out in turquoise.  Jesus loomed above us in the main dome, holding a blessing with one hand and a book in the other, surrounded by winged spirits who were perpetually dragging the resurrected messiah up to heaven.  None of the figures had pupils in their eyes, and so they stare, empty, forlorn down onto us.  The church showed its age.  The paint was chipped in places, a passageway had fallen, the lower parts of the wall had been scratched with crude graffiti.

We followed the steps further down to the bottom, a long line of tourists ahead of us and behind.  But when we reached the gorge the other tourists turned left to a nearby church, and we continued forwards, crossing the fast-flowing river.  After a few minutes we could no longer hear the noise of the tour groups.  Around us was the solitude of rocks and trees, of dust and bugs, the burble of water and the empty noise of wilderness.

We climbed up to another church carved into the farther cliff-face.  This one was less well-preserved, more isolated, less protected.  Three entrances with finely carved archways led into a darkened interior, the ceiling drooping with cobwebs.  Passing the weak flashlight against the walls we could make out the remains of the white and orange paint that had once brightened the walls.  A greek cross on a pillar.  Geometric patterns crawling along a ceiling.  As we went deeper into the ruin, the daylight was swallowed by the shadows, and we found the side-rooms and the small passageways completely dark.  The flashlight tried in vain to illuminate these big empty rooms, and we stopped on the threshold, peering inside, wondering what had once been there, trying to imagine what the church might have looked like back when it was filled with the noise of living.

-&-

On our way out of Cappadocia we passed by another fairy chimney site.  We stopped the car at an overlook and took pictures of the rock which fell like folds of fabric in an art-student’s texture study, honeycombed with floors, walls, windows, and doors.

It was amazing, but we had been looking at amazing things now for ten straight days, and in the late afternoon with four hours of driving ahead of us, we only enjoyed the scene briefly.  We quickly folded ourselves back into the car, passed by a parking lot full of tourist buses, empty besides their drivers, who lay idle in their driver’s seats, either napping the afternoon away or texting, ignoring the ponderous photo-worthy spires rising into the air above them.  They, too, were tired of beauty.  We drove onwards to Konya, where we would spend the night.

View Larger Map


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.

Day Nine: The Mysteries of Cappadocia, Unanswered and Beautiful. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day nine of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

In the early morning, the sky of Goreme is filled with the busy twitters of waking birds and the far-off hoots of sleepy owls.  Across the road from our hotel, an old woman eased her way out onto the terrace of her house, where she plucked cucumbers from the green burst of her garden.  A hot air balloon slowly lowered itself through the blue sky.  In an hour, the other tourists would come out of their rooms and sit down for breakfast, but for the moment I was alone, savoring the silence and the view of this strange city, too beautiful for words, too beautiful to even be a real city.

In the East, we felt like we were the last tourists on earth.  Children gawked at us, waiters asked us curiously where we were from and then frowned when we said ‘America’, the English was halting and uneasy.  But Goreme, in the ancient province of Cappadocia, was a tourist Disneyland.  We were helpfully provided with English signs, English-speaking shopkeepers, internet cafes, car rentals, knick-knack shops, and bars presenting authentic all-you-can-drink ‘Turkish Nights’ complete with belly dancing.  

Normal turkish life was absent, or at least hidden.  There were no dolmuses, not small bufes with rotisseries of doner turning in the heat, no cram schools for the kids.  I would like to say that I was disappointed to have everything around me be so safe and so accommodating, but after a week of adventure, it was a small relief to have a place where I felt like I belonged.

-&-

Goreme is famous for its fairy chimneys, large protuberances of rock erupting from the earth ten or fifteen stories into the air.  They look like hundreds of giant fingers, reaching up from the gorge of Goreme.  The rock is made of soft volcanic tuff, and over thousands of years people have carved houses and churches and cities into the stone.  Because of this, these bizarre towers of rock are often crowned with windows and pigeon holes, doors and stairs, that make them look alien and wonderful.

We drove towards the city of Urgup, passing by farmland rich with apricot trees, pumpkin and melon patches, grape vines, and wildflowers.  We parked on the side of the road next to Devrent Valley, a forest of fairy chimneys.  The powdery white paths that climbed the side of the valley were dotted with tourists.  They looked like ants scrambling up a pile of sugar.

We followed the tourists.  The fairy chimneys rose around us, strange, curious, like nothing we had ever seen before, like nothing we could explain.  Some were thin, some were thick.  Some looked like mushrooms with fat steps and tiny hats.  Some were stubby cones.  Some looked like perky breasts with tiny nipples, others looked like snaking phalluses.

After lunch we headed on another hike, this time in Pasabagi, a burst of roof-shaped fairy chimneys surrounded by a broad plateau.  A group of older Korean tourists were herded past an old church cut into the rock.  A band of Japanese tourists in fedoras, sports coats, man purses, bluetooth headsets and space shoes looked like they have been dropped in the canyon straight from a better future, gazing about themselves in every possible direction pointing camcorders and cameras.

We ducked into the church, behind the mass of Koreans.  The walls were scored with carvings, blackened with the soot of fires and candles, inlaid with alcoves, fountains, settings, and foot-and-hand holds that lead up to a second floor.  It looked like a Flintstones house.

Then we wandered up the snaking trail, going higher, getting farther away from the tourists, gaining a better view on the amazing landscape, and I tried to describe the things that I was seeing.  But I had no names for them, no way to put into words the odd collection of the pillars of earth except that they were different, picturesque, otherworldly, novel.  How did these things even happen?  I didn’t know.  They were as likely the work of a bored artist, sketching out an alien landscape as they were a product of the geologic forces that accounted for such everyday things as lakes and mountains.

And then all at once I didn’t care to solve the mystery of what created the fairy chimneys.  They were beautiful, and I was silenced by their beauty.

It just felt good to be walking in the kind sun, away from the city, out of the car, going out of earshot of the babble of languages.  After the boredom of yesterday’s ten-hour drive, our hike returned us to the realer world of walking and sweat.

We were silent.  But this was not the grumpy silence that had overcome us before.  We were silent because our lips were dumb to the pleasure of our legs and feet and skin as they walked surely over the uncertain ground.  And so what use did words have?  I didn’t want to understand how the fairy chimneys were formed, or who had carved out those rooms of rocks, or the history of invasion and conquest that scoured the landscape.  I just wanted to walk and look.

We made it to the topmost point and looked out for a moment.  Then we walked gingerly down the loose slope.

-&-

We ate dinner at the Top Deck Cafe, a year-old restaurant of stupendous hospitality and warmth—the best dining experience I’ve had in a whole year and a half of living in Turkey.  As we stood outside the restaurant, looking over the simple menu, the owner and chef Mustafa Ciftci swept us into the kitchen, where he showed us all the food that was on offer that day.  There were succulent lamb chops, chicken soup, mezze—Turkish appetizers—and vegetables.  Mustafa’s wife Zaida worked in the kitchen, while the couple’s two daughters provided us with menus and brought us to our seats on the floor along the wall.

The restaurant was a traditional Goreme house, a cave carved into the solid rock.  The eldest daughter, took our orders, and soon our small low-lying table was spread with a beautiful mezze plate of rice-stuffed vine leaves, home-made humous, chicken salad, eggplant, and a half-dozen other dips, spreads and nibbles, which we tucked into hurriedly, hungry from travel and the hike.

Soon our main dishes came.  I got the lamb chops.  The meat was so soft that when I picked up a bone the flesh simply fell off onto the plate.  The couple sitting next to us from New Zealand said it was the best lamb they’d ever had.  And they were from New Zealand, where there are more sheep than people.

As we ate, a conversation bubbled amongst the tables around us.  In the far corner an American man and a Turkish-American woman who were spending three weeks exploring all of turkey.  Next to our cushions were the Kiwis, who were sleepily full.  They were taking a year off everything to go see what they could of the world.  At the table to my left sat an older Dutch couple who were about to brave the wonders of the east.  We swapped stories of traveling Turkey, and jokes, and advice, and the restaurant was noisy with good-natured laughter.  The restaurant had the sort of conviviality you always want when you’re traveling.  Everyone was kind and happy, willing to talk and to chuckle.  And it had all happened so naturally.

When the meal was done the younger daughter brought us tea and the guestbook to sign.  The book was thick with compliments in dozens of languages, sentences upon sentences, pages upon pages.  It was amazing that the place had been open for only a year, and received this much good-will.  I picked up the pen, but for the second time that day my words failed me.  I couldn’t say anything.  The meal had been fantastic, the conversation friendly, the atmosphere open.  But I couldn’t write.  I couldn’t spoil the magic of that dinner by putting it into words.  So I wrote only a sentence, and passed the book on.  We drank our after-dinner teas and prepared to head to bed.

As we left, passing by the kitchen which stood next to the front door, we stopped to pay our compliments to Mustafa and Zaida.  We ended up standing there, chatting to the whole Ciftci family—mother and father and two daughters—until past ten at night.

“This cave is actually where I was born,” Mustafa told us, pointing to the far right corner of the dining room.  “There.”

The Ciftcis treated us like old family friends.  We showed them how to get English books on their iPads but soon ended up playing the Baby Monkey (Going Backwards On A Pig) App.  Our conversation fluttered with little tangents and jokes and digressions.  And for a moment it didn’t feel like we were in a restaurant where we had paid for the pleasure of eating, but at our friend’s house, chatting in the sleepy time after dinner.  We left reluctantly, pulled to our beds by tiredness and the promise of another full day.


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.