Walking with Nevzat

While my parents rested at the hotel, I took another walk with Nevzat. We started in Pigeon Valley, looped around Uchisar, crawled in cave homes, up and overlooking valleys with vastly different rock formations, crossed through water tunnels, passed little springs, rambled through the trees and climbed into churches and chapels. The fruit flowers were blooming, little birds were singing and the tortoises were procreating. It doesn’t look like a comfortable thing for them, but they did it with gusto, clacking their shells against each other’s. We said hello to people working in their gardens, some of them in the middle of nowhere. I wondered how they got their produce to their homes. When the ground was a bit slippery or steep, Nevzat held his hand out for me, palm up. I felt like a lady. I wondered if anyone saw us from a distance, and what they thought of such a delicate gesture.
For four and a half hours, we walked. I’m most interested in the chapels and churches, the buildings sculpted out of rock, the thought and planning that has to go into extracting rather than adding material to form a little dome, a pilaster, an altar space. Some of the chapels had little tombs cut out of the rock floors, the bodies long gone. Some had painted walls and ceilings. I try to imagine the depth of faith a monk had to have to carve out a space and isolate himself from the world, or of the coming and going of people in the landscape. Four and a half hours later, I returned to the hotel, sunburned, sore and very happy.