My second morning in Urgup, I felt as if I had already established a routine. I walked downstairs to the lobby, dropped my anchored key on the desk — with a thump and a “Gunaydin” (“Good morning”) to the owner watching TV — and headed out into the sunny courtyard, past the cushioned banquettes set into arches along the side of the hotel, to the little canteen at the base of a sheer rock wall. There, the owner’s daughter brought me breakfast — a plate of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, olives, beyaz cheese (Turkish feta), a basket of bread and jam — and then hovered timidly, offering more bread, shooing the cat, her wavy black hair falling thickly onto her gray cotton cardigan.
I was the hotel’s only guest. The first day I had felt awkward; today, almost regal. It was helpful having a routine in a place as strange, as troglodytic, as Cappadocia. Driving from Kayseri (practically the geographic heart of Turkey), you start out in a landscape like Wyoming, minus the sagebrush but with the same scrub-covered mountains rising gradually from the plain. Then you come upon some stone outcrops and the cryptic openings of a few tantalizing caves. Urgup, as you descend the mountain, appears like any town in the distance, with modern apartment blocks ribbing its sides, but as you enter you see that the place curls around a centerpiece of rock. It is like entering someone’s living room and finding the sofa abutting a boulder.
The streets look quite normal, but going out from the main square you find the houses retreating into rock, some actually crunched under overhangs. What could be a dreary petrified aspect is relieved by the organic wholeness. Everything consists of stone and has the stone’s unifying khaki hue; it is difficult to tell sometimes where geology ends and urban planning begins. You wonder almost if the town was not built but chiseled, house by house, out of a blanket of rock, and the sculptors, for some unknown reason, left a large chunk unfinished in the middle.
As astonishing as the scenery is, the gradual discovery that this harmony — of boulder and building, nature and man — survives in the contemporary lives of the citizens. That first afternoon the hotel owner, Orhan, led me to the rock face punctuating his back yard where, up some steps of stone, we entered the bar he had established in a cave. Handsome kilims hung on rough-hewn walls and beautifully embroidered cushions softened molded banquettes. In the middle of the ceiling, a narrow chute with thin metal handles led dizzyingly to an upper level. (Orhan turned on the light, but we didn’t climb up.)
It was the coziest cave I had ever seen. I had always admired the Mediterraneans’ talent for transforming the mundane — the way they can take a bit of sidewalk and throw down a couple tables and hang a few light bulbs and create an ambience — but this domesticating of caverns seemed to take the art to a whole new level.
Below, Orhan led me into a second grotto, the walls still thick with troughs (in the past, animals were kept on the ground floor, while the people lived upstairs), and then down a dank tunnel that emptied into another cave, this one built with a 4-foot-high retaining wall that held back a pool of collected rainwater. (We could hear a slow and steady drip, drip, drip.) This, Orhan explained, kept his garden prospering in the dry summer months.
“My English,” Emel said apologetically, grabbing the cat off the table, “vedy little.”
“What are you reading?” I asked her, miming a reader. When I had come out for breakfast, she had been sitting on the banquette, engrossed in a book. She went out to retrieve it. The cover read: “Olmus Ruhlar,” Nikolai Gogol.
“Dead Souls,” I guessed, and then turning inside, saw that I was right. “It’s a wonderful book.”
“Yes!” she said. “Wonderful!”
“You like books?” I asked.
“Yes, I like. Flaubert. Tolstoy. Goethe. American, I not know.”
“Mark Twain?”
“Oh, yes. I know.” Then a pause. “Dostoevski — American?”
“No, Russian. Rooski.”
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“Oh. Vedy good. I like.”
I showed her the novel I was reading, by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. “Yes,” she said. “Vedy good. Vedy good.”
Emel had finished high school, I learned, but had never gone on to college. Now she spent her days working at the family hotel and reading classics among the rocks.
The minibus filled quickly: a family from South Africa, an Australian woman, two young Canadian men in voluminous shorts, two couples from Hong Kong, another from Singapore, a lone American. Children of a vanished empire, convened at the crossroads of East and West. Our guide’s name was Mustafa.
We headed out into the countryside, which was like no countryside any of us had ever seen in our disparate homelands. Vast ridges of erratic rock inflated the landscape with an unearthly beauty, a dreamy tumble. Stones erupted in fantastic contortions, smoothed and buffed like Henry Moore sculptures. A few miles away, an army of behemoths occupied Goreme, so that instead of a village with rocks you had rocks with a village. There were high-rise caves all in a row with wind-carved roofs that looked like thatch turned to stone. A grove appeared of pinnacles and cones, each thrusting a rounded rock into the sky, the top-heavy caps turning the lot into a sex-shop shelf of Brobdingnagian organs.
“This is called Love Valley,” Mustafa said. “Thirty million years ago three volcanoes erupted in Cappadocia: Erciyes, Melendiz and Hasan. The volcanic ash carried rocks along with it. The ash hardened, but not as hard as the rocks, so over the years it erodes much quicker. We call these formations `fairy chimneys.’ “
The place was vaguely reminiscent of South Dakota’s Badlands, but on a much larger scale and with an ancient culture. The Hittites lived here in 2000 B.C., mixing with the already-settled Hatti; they were followed by Lydians, Phrygians, Byzantines, Romans, Greeks. Each group in its turn bred horses (the name Cappadocia comes from the Hittite for “land of pretty horses”), farmed the fertile soil and tunneled into the malleable rock, some of them creating not just homes but churches (whose frescoes are still visible), monasteries and entire underground cities. When the Arabs arrived, the Christians found this burrowing lifestyle a veritable godsend.
We drove west to the Ihlara Valley, where we took a walk between a bubbling brook and a sheer cliff dotted with still more caves. At one point we heard a shout, and turning around saw a peasant woman coming up fast on a trotting donkey. She pulled to a halt so we could take her picture.
Back in Urgup I stopped to admire a truck adorned with an illustration of a man with a mustache so long that it curled up under the noses of two tickled bystanders. A Turk had told me: “In some villages still, you’re not a man until you grow a mustache.”
“It’s lovely isn’t it?” a female voice behind me said. I turned and found a young woman sitting under a willow tree drinking tea. She had black, close-cropped hair; a dusky complexion; small, perfect white teeth. “It’s by the cartoonist Coplu. He’s in there,” she said, pointing to the cafe. “He does work for the Turkish Daily News.”
Sara was from Sydney and, like a lot of Australians, was traveling slowly. In fact, she had decided to linger for a while in Urgup. “I must have gone dotty in the head to settle in a place where women are relegated to such low status,” she said. But she was diligently learning Turkish, and finding virtues. “The people here are intellectually curious. They don’t have a peasant mentality.” I thought of Emel.
“What is your background?” I asked, curious.
“Bitsof, as we say in Australia. Bits of this and bits of that. Portuguese-Indian on one side, Burmese-Malay on the other. Oh, and I can’t forget my Scottish grandmother.”
The thunderstorm broke just as I got back to my hotel. It sounded as if all the rocks of Cappadocia were being tossed into the Ihlara Valley. After 45 minutes, it was over.
I walked out to find that the street had become a river. At the first intersection I had to jump across using little sandbars left by the flood. Downtown, shopkeepers threw buckets of water over the sidewalk tiles and then, with wide brooms, vigorously swept away the silt. It was the most active I had seen the town.
I stopped at a wine shop. I had heard about the white wines of Cappadocia, and wanted a taste, but the merchant sold only bottles. No matter. He took one down, popped the cork and poured me a glass as if I were a long-absent friend. We sat on opposite benches; he offered me an open bag of Doritos. He did not speak English. We sat in companionable silence, which was broken only by the muezzin’s call to evening prayer. Finishing the wine, I got up and reached for my wallet. The merchant brought his right hand to his heart and made an obeisant bow.
“Hello, my friend, where are you from?”
It was the carpet seller’s tired line, but I was in a good mood, walking along the still-wet streets and passing the shopkeepers schmoozing on their stools.
“I’ve been to Cocoa Beach. Gainesville. Jacksonville. I took Greyhound to Atlantic City. I like Florida better.”
He was a short, bald man with intelligent brown eyes and a thin Roman nose. His name was Remzi. “Like the king. This is my friend Mustafa — he’s visiting from Iran — and Huseyin.”
“But not Saddam,” Huseyin said laughing.
“There’s a slide show in five minutes over in the town center,” Remzi said. “You want to see it?” If this was a pitch for a carpet, it was the most elaborate one I had come across.
The auditorium was empty; a man on the stage called to Remzi. “The show’s tomorrow,” Remzi said. “I got it wrong. But he says we can watch them getting it ready. He’s a local archeologist.”
We took seats in the front row, Remzi sitting proprietorially in the middle. “That’s Zelve Monastery,” he said to me as the first slide appeared to the accompaniment of liturgical music. “That’s Uchisar, the houses climbing up the face of the rock. That’s Love Valley. Those are frescoes from the New Church in Goreme — Byzantine art from the 10th Century. You enjoying it, Mustafa?”
After about half an hour the rehearsal ended, and we headed back to the shop. “Hello, how are you doing?” Remzi called to the merchants sitting out along Kayseri Street. “How’s business?”
He turned to me. “I love to speak English to my friends. I teach in the evenings — a lot of the shopkeepers like to learn English. It helps in their business. I’m also a tour guide. But my real job is as an agricultural agent. I’m a very busy man.”
Back at his shop, Remzi invited me in for tea. Here goes, I thought. I confessed that I was a journalist, uninterested in shopping. He understood perfectly. The tea arrived in its tiny tulip-shaped glass. His assistant rolled out the first brilliant rug.
“You have these in Iran,” he said to Mustafa. “All the dyes,” he said, turning to me, “are natural. The blue comes from the juice of grapes. The red from apricot blossoms. The green from pistachios. The brown from walnut husks. The pink from rose petals.”
I took out my notebook, to demonstrate my scholarly interest. More carpets were presented. The assistant picked them off of rolled piles and unfurled them with a taciturn, ta-DA! flourish, one atop another in a growing mound whose purpose seemed to be to produce enough guilt in me to buy at least one so he wouldn’t have to go and pick them all up.
“This is an undyed carpet,” he said, showing one in white, brown and black. His assistant brought over a photograph of a flock of sheep exhibiting the same three natural hues. “You see this only in Urgup.”
“Who makes these carpets?” I asked.
“Peasants — women mostly. They make them in the winter, when there’s nothing to do in the fields. One or two will work on a carpet, more for the bigger ones. They sit around and gossip and sing.”
“Well,” I said, finishing my tea, “that was very educational.”
Remzi looked pleased.
The next morning I waited at the hotel for Asim, a friend of a friend whom I had called out of the blue and who said he would drive down from Ankara — about 150 miles — to meet me.
He was three hours late — a lanky young man with wavy black hair and a gentle expression. He had brought his girlfriend, Tulay, who had long blond hair tied in the back and an irrepressible smile. (Her mother, I would learn, was German.) Despite the late start, we repaired to the canteen where Emel brought us tea.
It was decided that we would drive to Hacibektas, and then back to Ankara, where I would stay with them. Before we left, Emel insisted on showing them the caves. At one point I noticed her talking quietly with Tulay.
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“What was she saying to you?” I asked Tulay when we got in the car.
“She asked me how she could learn English.”
Hacibektas sits at the northern tip of Cappadocia, across the Kizil Irmak, the longest river in Asia Minor. It takes its name from the great Sufic philosopher Haci Bektas Veli, who settled in the area in the 13th Century and developed within Islam a radical system of belief. One of his more famous sayings — reflecting a sentiment that Ataturk would embrace seven centuries later — was: “A nation which does not educate its women cannot progress.”
“I like the Bektasi,” Tulay said as we walked to the monastery. “They are more open, more tolerant, more inquiring. They read a lot.”
“They allow women and men to be together,” said Asim. “They even have dances in which the men dance with the women. This is very strange for Islam.”
We entered a room thick with sepulchers. The tomb of Haci Bektas was draped in a green cloth squirted with Arabic script and protected by a clear plastic sheet. A middle-age man was slowly making his way around it, stopping at each side to kiss the sheet, touch his forehead to it, kiss and touch again.
From the courtyard we entered a room bordered by a wooden platform that was raised only a few inches off the ground and divided into 12 sections. “There are 12 imams,” explained Asim, “like the 12 apostles. And there are other similarities to Christianity. The use of alcohol for example — the drinking of wine is important. The number 3 also has significance.
“The Bektasi don’t go to mosque,” he said. “There are no mosques in town. They believe you can talk directly to God, you don’t need a building. They have houses where they meet sometimes.”
On the way out, we passed a bust of Ataturk. I was surprised, remembering that he had closed the monastery after taking power in 1923. “He closed all religious schools,” Asim explained. “And he couldn’t make an exception. But they like him all the same. Because they are for democracy. The Bektasi and the military are the two forces we have in this country to keep the fundamentalists in check.” Mystics and generals.
Back in the car, we headed north toward Ankara. The road was straight and level; rock fantasies gave way to featureless plains. The world, physically at least, had returned to normal.
DETAILS ON CAPPADOCIA
Getting there: The easiest way is to fly Turkish Airlines from Istanbul to Kayseri; the two-hour flight costs about $60. (The bus takes about 12 hours.) Once in Kayseri, you can take a bus to one of several towns in Cappadocia.
Lodging: Most people stay in Goreme or Urgup. The people in Urgup say their town has more amenities; the people of Goreme probably make the same claim. Urgup turned out to be a very agreeable place to stay — conveniently located and well-supplied with tour companies and hotels.
My hotel — the Hitit (Istiklal Caddesi, phone: 011-90-384-341-44-81; fax: 011-90-384-341-36-20) — was a wonderful deal at about $21 a night.
Eating: Have guvec, a delicious clay-pot casserole — meat and vegetables or just vegetables — with bread baked around and atop the pot that you can break off and dip into the delicious stew. Accompany it, of course, with a bottle of Cappadocian white wine.
Sightseeing: You have three main options: Rent a car (about $50 a day), take a tour (a popular company is Magic Valley) or hire a guide (see Personal best).
Guidebooks: As usual, “Turkey: The Rough Guide” (Rough Guides; $19.95) proved invaluable. In addition to the thorough (and accurate) practical information, it gives fascinating background on Turkish history, contemporary politics, food, music, film, literature — even going so far as to include excerpts from popular writers.
Information: Contact the Turkish Government Tourism Office, 1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Suite 306, Washington, D.C. 20036, 202-429-9844.
Personal best: The multifaceted Remzi — rug merchant, English teacher, agricultural agent, tour guide — is an honest and delightful man who knows Cappadocia inside (important there) and out.
Contact Remzi Kaya, Ev-Ka Sitesi 19, Blok No. 12, Urgup, Turkey. His carpet shop is on Kayseri Cadessi, phone 011-90-384-341-4250.