If you’d asked me six months ago where Cappadocia was, I would have guessed central Europe. But, as you no doubt already knew, it’s central Turkey. And, at this time of the year, tourists swarm all over it, like ants on jam. We come for two main reasons, and to see the first of them you need only to get up from this balcony, leave the restaurant, climb two sets of steps, pass through a corridor of sorts and open the door to our hotel room.
It’s fitted with the usual conveniences: a well-plumbed bathroom, electric light, soft furnishings and so on. But the walls and floor and ceiling are of rock. Not hewn rock laid in blocks, but rock that has been hollowed out from the inside. The room’s a cave that has been dug by hand, a cave that’s cool in summer, warm in winter, being insulated by a mountainside of rock.
They’ve been digging caves round here for centuries. A mile outside of town there’s a warren of them dug 1500 years ago by early Christians. There are refectories, with communal tables and benches carved from the rock, and dormitories, with sleeping cubicles carved from the rock, and more than a dozen churches, their rocky walls and ceilings bright with painted images of Jesus and the saints. Elsewhere there are entire underground cities, dug as refuges. If a township was attacked, the people just withdrew below ground, rolled the great rock doors closed behind them and holed up until the raiders went away.
(The worker across the way has finished lowering the blocks of stone and has now turned his attention to some flimsy wooden scaffolding that he seems to be shoring up. The sound of each hammer blow reaches me a fraction later than the sight of it.)
It isn’t just men that do things with the soft volcanic rock. The climate does as well. The hot summers and harsh winters eat at it, sculpting it into conical forms that the brochures label ‘fairy chimneys’. There are thousands of these chimneys scattered about, no two the same, and the best way to view them is from the air. Which is the second reason that the tourists come.
Just before sunrise every morning, a fleet of minivans and taxis scours the town, sucking the tourists from their cave hotels and driving them to open land where they are greeted by a remarkable sight. Spread about the landscape, and at various stages of inflation, lie a hundred vast hot air balloons. As the gas-fired burners heat the air inside them, one by one the balloons stand up. Their paying customers clamber into the wicker baskets, the assistants let go of the mooring ropes and they’re off. In silence.
Soon the still air above Goreme is thick with huge balloons lilting over the landscape as the sun rises on another day. Each balloon flies for an hour or so, climbing to a thousand metres, swooping low over the rock formations, then returning to the launching area, where a skilled driver in a Land Rover somehow reverses a heavy metal trailer underneath it as it descends, and the assistants grab the mooring ropes and haul it down and clamp it onto the trailer and everyone in the basket bursts into applause.
(The worker over the way has sat down in the shade and is drinking from what looks to be a bottle of lemonade. He’s also lit a cigarette. I think I’ll have just one more cup of coffee.)
