Maccan

My trip was nighing its end. I had no further plans. The last place I had been was the small town Hacı Bektaş, where I had been the guest of a clan of gypsies in the temporarily squatted carcass of an unfinished building. They had shared their low quality tea and white bread with me, and my heart had warmed especially to the blond, blue-eyed boy Serhan, a 10-year old orphan, who, despite the fact that he had the mien of a mischievous mini-macho, was actually hard-working and very generous, giving me food and all his candy. He was taken care of by his grandmother, who was mostly seen sitting in the corner on her own, a glum look on her face. Her husband had recently died.

From there on, my road was unclear. One evening I just decided I had to move on out of Hacı Bektaş, and so there I was by the roadside. And that is how once again, fate's little sister, chance, took my hand and led me on... in the guise of a lift I got hitchhiking, of course.

I had not planned to come to Cappadocia, that most touristy of regions of Turkey, even though I was just round the corner. However, the next thing that came along was a car full of young travellers, most of them from France, who were going just that way. Slightly inebriated from an afternoon of Rakı drinking, they were gushing about the feast they had had in the company of some or other spiritual leader that afternoon at the Alevite city Hacı Bektaş. Everyone who had entered the room had gone to kiss the eldest man's hand, speeches had been made, and two men had kept passing the saz from one to another at the table all the while a bounteous meal was being served. The travellers had been taken on this adventure by the owner of the pension where they had hung their hats the past few nights, and who was presently driving the car. The sun was already going down, and I quickly struck a deal with him; I would help him do some work round his pension, in exchange for a bed.
Turned out, I ended up staying a week (...and could have stayed much longer).

As we rolled into the village, its name being Göreme, at the centre of the region, I was duely impressed. The first thing I saw were the -literally- 100s of tanned white people´s limbs, in shorts and sleeveless shirts, having gathered on the central square for the night busses. In Central Turkey that much flesh revealed is a thing to shock the prudish eyes of the veteran traveler!
I had last visited the region seven years ago, and whereas I would not say that Göreme was then a pristine Anatolian village, it had been a far cry from the spectacle before my eyes right now. I remembered the village as one of dusty, unasphalted streets, and indeed, I admit, over all these years I had kept a cherished memory of beautiful hikes through the wondrous landscapes surrounding it.
When I first visited I had of course the benefit of the feeling, for that only the French have a curt word that captures it so well -se sentir dépaysé - best rendered as...well, to feel pleasantly transported when being in a different culture, a strong change of scenery. A feeling you can only get in a place much unlike your own, and to which you are still not acclimatized. Quite accustomed to the charms of Turkey now, and so without this benefit, today I was still going to see the beauty of the troglodytes and the stranger ones of the rock formations when they were in front of me, but, surrounded by so many tourists, I did not again manage to feel elated by these sights.

Yet, Cappadocia is historically impressive. The many churches left in the region are ancient. As far back as in Roman times, the eroded landscape of volcanic rock lent itself to some of the earliest Christians, who, persecuted by the Empire, could live and practice their faith in the reclusion of underground cities and churches. Even under Byzantine rule, when Cappadocia was situated on the Eastern fringe of the state, the particularities of the region helped the locals withstand the frequent raids of the Persian Sassanide enemies.
Much later still, the cool troglodytes of Ortahisar served as a depository for the citrus fruit of the Mediterranean, before being exported all across what is now the Republic of Turkey.

If, in hindsight, I remember my week in Göreme, it seems to me, I had a rather sleep-deprived one. This had several reasons.

The pension, Tabiat (meaning "Nature"), where I was staying, was right next to the mosque. The booming voice of the muezzin that came on at prayer time, was enough to shake even the soundest sleeper awake. It was so loud that when it came on in the evening, during dinner time, all conversation died down in the court yard, you simply could not hear a thing. "Once I asked the imam, 'why do you guys always shout so loud? It is annoying my guests, you know'", Ibrahim, the owner of the pension, liked to joke, "and the next thing they did was they put another speaker up".
As for me, every night, I waited for the crackle of the microphone at the end of the long call for prayer as a kind of Pavlovian signal to let the dizziness of sleep creep back over me. I got maybe another three hours more sleep, because in the mornings, likewise, something was bound to awaken me early. Ibrahim had said to me I could take a bed in the empty dormitory, but out of politeness I insisted to sleep in the yard. It is true I prefer open sky to any kind of roof any way.
And so, every morning at around 6 o'clock, right after sunrise, the feral roar of the hot air balloons right over me would disrupt my sleep and make for early get ups.

But what was worse, was that it was Ramadan. During this holy month, believing Muslims are not allowed to eat or drink in the daytime, which I am sure is common knowledge. Now, villagers anywhere in Muslim countries organise themselves so as to have some sort of nightly wake-up call in the early morning hours (usually a boy with a drum), so they can eat their breakfast (the Sahura meal) before going back to bed. This made for yet another nightly disruption. Almost pointless to go to bed, right? Knowing that the call to prayer would shatter the silence again a short two hours later, I usually relinquished the temptation to try to go back to sleep and went for walks through the village during this time.

In my first night in the village, I did not walk far from my place before I started talking to the young man at nightwatch at the carpet shop. That night´s adventure was that he made me climb the Roman Cemetary tower, very close to there. It was a truely difficult climb up the brittle Tuff rock, which crumbles and slides so easily under your grip. The tower also accordingly has huge `Do not enter, Danger´ signs outside, and is only used by village youth to stack their weed in a place the police will not look. And so, as we watched the sunrise from up there, we only had to roll a joint and light it up to round off the moment.

The second night I wanted to find out who that madman with the drum was who came for the second time now, rudely rousing me from sleep. Awaking people in the night with a drum seems like the right kind of teenage activity to me. And so, as I followed the sound of the drum at two at night, it was a bunch of kids taking turns beating the shit out of the instrument and singing the Ramadan manisi. There are many versions of this kind of folk poetry made into a song on Ramadan nights, and the one I got to hear here was rather funny:

"Akşamdan pilavı pişirdim
Gene karnımı şişirdim
Çok mani diyecektim ama
Defteri yolda düşürdüm"

"Çatal kaşık elimde,
Besmele var dilimde,
Fazla kaşık salladım,
Bir sızı var kolumda"

"In the evening I cooked some rice,
again I filled my belly well,
I was going to sing many verses to you tonight,
but I lost the sheet with the lyrics on the way"

or

"A "Bismillah" on my lips
I ate so much with that spoon of mine
my arm is in pain."

The boy finished his singsong with the injunction "üstüne bir kahve iç, Terâviheye geç kalma!"-"Drink a coffee while you can and don't be late for the Terâvihe prayer".
That night, just when I had caught up with the gang of boys taking turns in doing the drumming, they had climed onto a rock and the echo was reverberating across the hollow pit of the village at their feet. For a minute it sounded like there was a second drummer out there somewhere. I followed the group in their trail. The boys told me they worked in a pide restaurant in the evenings, and during Ramadan they spend their night playing cards or backgammon in the café by the canal, until it was time to do their job (payed by the local imam, one person per night got some pocket-money for it). After eating, they went to bed at dawn, sleeping away the heat, and most of the fasting hours.

Of course I was hoping one of the boys would invite me home for Sahura. Not feeling hungry, I saw myself picking at the olives a little bit, maybe eating a slice of bread and honey. But when you want it most, the trick does not work of course and the hospitality was not forth-coming. I just wasn't lucky this time around.

In any case, my nightly escapades did help me to scratch through the surface of this tourist trap of a village. You had to scratch pretty hard, I admit it, but you could find it, the "real" Turkey, the "normal" Turkey, what do you call it...
Despite the massive houses made of local stone that can only be seen in Cappadoccia, and which betray the richness that tourism has brought to this region, underneath it all - it was there - a quite normal, Central Anatolian village.
There was the café with the men playing tavela, deserted at the time of the evening prayer, but becoming slowly populated again shortly after everyone had eaten (gluttonously at the end of a long day of fasting...). In the early evenings, there were the teenage girls in their colourful fake-silk headscarf walking around, indulging in the Ramadan-night frenzy of constant consumption, even if it was only sunflower seeds. Maybe you'd see small boys on their way home from the shop, having both hands full of ice-cream bought for everyone. On the streetcorner, also a typical sight, there would be the women of several families together (the region being rather conservative, few local women went unveiled), cooking their kışlık on the street, that is, preparing great quantities of tomato sauce or frying aubergines to can them for the winter. In the night you could see the wandering watermelon vendors sleep on the back of their trucks, among all the fruit, just like anywhere else in Turkey.
When it was market time, people from surrounding villages would come and sell all and everything out of their car boots: Fruit and vegetables, knifes and forks, even plastic brooms and toys.

Moreover, after a few days already, the village had started to know me. Le bruit court vite, especially in Turkey. "You are German and you speak Turkish well", a woman I had never seen before stopped me on the street. The latter assessment was an exaggeration of course, but in any case, rising notoriety obliges, and I made mental note not to pilfer any more ice-cream from the overpriced shops from now on.

I would not have made any true friends though, if it was not for Brutus, Ibrahim´s canine cohort. He was a hip-high Kangal, Turkey´s national breed, and made for a good hiking companion. He was still young and a bit of a kid, chasing cats round the corner, or chicken up the fence, and had to be rebuked for that sometimes.
When Ibrahim pointed out to me why he chose that name for the dog, I could see it immediately: Ibrahim´s dignified grey hair and aquiline nose in profile indeed made him resemble a certain Roman emperor, whose sidekick Brutus had historically been.

The way these two found each other was as follows: Ibrahim had found Brutus on his doorstep one day, as an orphaned puppy. In order to raise the Kangal puppy, Ibrahim gave the dog milk, and cooked meals not only consisting of potatoes and macaroni, but also containing meat and liver. You had to do that, Ibrahim explained to me otherwise a dog without mother´s milk would not grow as tall as Brutus had done.

Kangals can be dangerous, too. Most to be afraid of are the dogs you meet out in the nature. Maybe the sheep they guard are somewhere around. But beware of stray dogs, too. Sometimes people let their former guard dogs free, if they don´t need them anymore. In this way, dangerous dogs come to roam the street. Especially in winter when they are hungry you must watch out.

Taking Brutus with me, one evening I made it to the designated `sunset spot´ at the other end of a long valley. When the two of us arrived, the crowd had already duely gathered. The glowing, red ball began its ratcheting descent in a steep arch, growing gradually closer to the vertical. Finally, the sun was slurped down as quickly as a Tequila Sunrise, and only the afterglow remained. On the other side of the horizon the night seeped up stealthily, pale, ashen, the foreglow of darkness. I ticked the activity off my "to-do" list, but did not exactly feel touched by the moment.

During the preceding few days, I had made friends with some Spanish tourists and shared their day trips and midnight barbecue at the feet of impressive, sleek white Tuff rock, folded like pale giants limbs, made more dramatic by the full moon shadows. In other free moments I took the dog and walked the Gothic jaggedness of the Rose Valley, or that assembly of huge, carmine shards jutting up from the ground, the Red Valley. It is true that in my week in the village, the most fun I had was probably by sneaking into rich hotels to use their swimming pools, day time or night time, for whatever that is worth. Ultimately Cappadoccia remained a place where I was bound to get bored quickly...