henna

These are my hands with henna. It's funny how people react to them. Some start to sing songs which I assume are associated with the ritual, others turn up their noses in various degrees of disgust. It's for old village women they say.

Photos from Cappadocia

The Princess Diaries: Season 2

I recently returned from another two week, working vacation in Cappadocia where I again gave English lessons and edited texts in exchange for room and board at a very special cave hotel, the Museum Hotel in Uchisar. Again, I was fed far too much extremely good food, explored one of my favorite places free of many tourists, tramped in the snow, and cleared my head of the first school term. For several of those days, I returned to my room, Castle, where I could look out onto the balloons rising in the morning, or across to the Buket Hotel, or in the other direction to whichever valley is beyond the window. I can't remember which it is. Not only do I love the room, but I love the fact that I have to go through a tunnel, slightly bent so as not to hit my head on the doorways, to reach it. I’m a lucky lucky woman.

Walking

For the past two days, we’ve the worst snow in Cappadocia in 15 years. This morning, there was no evidence that I had helped shovel the night before. I learned an important lesson though. It's much nicer to shovel with a wooden shovel than a metal one.

Because the roads were so bad, the personnel service bus left early, and I had few friends with whom to speak. I was bored, so I wrapped myself up warmly and walked up the hill to the very small shopping area in Uchisar to buy some chocolate. I also wanted to buy a toy or something for a German boy who is staying here with 3 adults. He seemed so stir crazy. I got him some pastel pencils (no regular colored pencils to be found) and gave him an old sketch book. Before dinner the following evening, he shyly presented me a drawing of fairy chimneys with an erupting volcano in the middle. It’s really sweet.

As I was walking and talking to the few people who were shovelling snow, I noticed one open shop. It looked so cosy and warm from outside the steamed windows that I decided to enter and look around. Three men were sitting on low chairs, eating from an equally low table. In the center of the table was a huge terra cotta cooking vessel with a shallow edge, filled with ground meet and eggs cooked on top. No forks, just scoop up the food with a little bread. They invited me to eat (I am so well-fed at the hotel that I can never fit anything else in my ever larger person) and tea. After the meal and tea were finished, Taner showed me the rest of his shop concealed by a kilim hung over the doorway. I found some lovely things and learned that what I had thought was part of a pulley was actually a carved walnut, roasted coffee bean cooler. Such a beautiful solution to an everyday task. I looked at the special combs women used to comb the wool for kilim yarn. It's a very different technique than carpet yarn combing. I couldn’t resist one made of metal, like a bent and incised fork for pulling wool through to retain the length of the wool fibers. According to Taner, I have very different tastes than most people. Guilty.

Taner later showed me some of his kilims and carpets. Of course the first thing I saw was a beautiful, 40-50 year old tuylu of naturally colored wool. Tuylu means “furry.” This kind of rug is called tuylu because, after it’s woven, long strands of mohair are pulled through and knotted on the underside. They look kind of like shag rugs but furrier. And nicer. It's a very good thing I didn't have my wallet with me. Besides, what am I going to do with one more tuylu in addition to the three I already own? I told Taner about my silly dream to buy a nomad’s yurt and fix my living room (when I have my own, of course) as a tented space. He didn't think that was odd because he intends to do something similar with one of the rooms in his shop. It would be a place for his guests in the pension above to relax and drink tea. So, maybe I'm not completely crazy. When I told him about my project (not yet abandoned) of learning about kilims, he said the best way would be to stay in his shop during the summer and watch the repairmen. In exchange, I would sit in the front of the store and say hello to passersby and woo them into the shop. If I went on a tour, I could, without pushing of course, steer the tourists in the direction of A la Turka Collection. Now, this is the second time that someone has offered me a job selling carpets. Is it my winning personality and enthusiasm for the merchandise that compels them to do this? I don’t care. It’s nice to be offered random jobs.

When I told Taner of my plan to ask a local boy (who knows secret places better than a kid?) to be my guide to the hidden spaces in Uchisar, he recommended I call a friend of his who can show me the cave churches and chapels in Uchisar. I know where two are. These aren't painted churches. Apparently there weren't a lot of Christians in this village in comparison to Urgup and Goreme where there are plenty of paintings.

Later that week...
By coincidence, my friend Irfan was shovelling snow in front of his closed shop at the time I was walking past it. I drank many glasses of tea with him in his shop last year. He’s an art historian and guide, so we have much to talk about, especially regarding Byzantine churches in Cappadocia. Because it’s so dead here in the winter, it's better for him to lead tours than to have one or two little sales every day. We stood in the street and talked about some of the buildings in Uchisar. He's got quite a bit of knowledge in his head about the town, and I want to pick every last bit of it. He told me that there was a caravansary in Uchisar, not a large structure similar to others on the Silk Road, but one carved into a cave. lrfan played in its stables when he was a child. He has a project to convince the municipality to move the road that is covering parts of the now rubble-filled caravansary and restore it to a decent condition. I'm all for that. I shared my bright idea to propose a graduate seminar on historic preservation in Uchisar at the Middle Eastern Technical University. Some say it’s too late for Uchisar, but I can have my little fantasy.

I stopped by to say hello to Taner in his carpet/antiques shop. I have this huge problem (yep, it's really a problem) that when I stop to say hello for a few minutes, I'm offered a glass of tea and wind up talking for a while. Maybe it’s because people are bored in the winter. Or maybe it’s because I talk a lot. It’s more likely due to the fact that people here are incredibly welcoming. When I told him I was interested, he immediately called his friend who was there in five minutes. I recognised Nevzat, a nut brown, wrinkled man with a few missing teeth. He often hangs around the castle to offer his services as a guide. We had even spoken briefly the day before in front of the castle near my favorite antique shop. He doesn't speak much English, but he guides other guides from elsewhere because he knows the area so well. For 30 YTL (I could have bargained for less, but there's a hell of a lot of snow here,) he will show me the churches we can actually reach, and many of the old abandoned houses. Life is good.

Nevzat

From inside an abandoned house

This morning, I met Nevzat in Uchisar village. Uchisar is at the peak of Cappadocia. The old village is made of an irregular terrace with houses extending from the side of the hill. The stone houses don’t exactly cling to the hill because they’re connected to caves and therefore extend from it. In other words, the houses are constructed and carved. Some houses are in disrepair, the caves inside filled with dirt and rubble. Some of the houses are being restored. Nevzat pointed at certain houses and told me the nationalities of the people who had bought them. French, Japanese, German. A little further down the hill is a series of fairy chimneys, our destination.

Nevzat

We followed a road I had not yet explored, down the side of the hill. I made him stop in the empty houses, and despite the snow, we managed to get to second floors. He explained to me which rooms were for storage, which were kitchens with a tandir, a hole in the floor that served as an oven. From there, we entered a cave structure, an apartment-like building with many houses, kitchens, dove cotes... I would never have dared enter by myself for fear that I would collapse with a floor. Most of the time I wasn’t scared, yet we did cross some slightly treacherous territory. At times, we had to exit the cave interior and climb across the exterior. When you touch wet tufa, your hand gets a bit sandy. I was a little afraid I would slip and fall while moving from one cave to another. Nevzat always took my hand when it was a bit iffy, and he pulled me up more than one snow-covered tufa staircase. I was struck by the contrast between my very white and his brown, farmer like hands.

I wish I could show you every detail, the pigeon cotes with little niches, almost like those for religious statues. Some of the rooms had few niches, others were dedicated solely to the birds, with rows of niches, places for food, a carved column in the center. Some of the chapels were turned into pigeon houses during the Ottoman period. Most that were originally carved by the Ottomans have paintings on the exteriors where the birds entered, in the same burnt sienna color as in the churches. Since these were on plaster, they are better preserved. Some of the Arabic is probably legible, and there are pictures of men on horseback, birds, and other symbols. I tried to ask Nevzat why the cotes almost always have paintings. He thought I asked what they were for, and explained how the inhabitants collected the pigeon poop, put it into packets, and carried it to their gardens by horse. I skimmed a book I just bought on Cappadocia, that explains that it was believed that pigeons are attracted to color. There are very few birds in them now. Nevzat explained to me, if I understood correctly, that bats killed the birds, sucked their blood and left the dead bodies.
We climbed up and down winding staircases, looked up through chimneys. Nevzat showed me where wine and pekmez (grape pectin, a kind of molasses still eaten in Turkey) were made in rectangular structures, where the animals ate in the stables, where horses were kept (now how the hell a horse got up into the fairy chimney I do not know), where the bakeries were. In one kitchen, we entered a slightly twisting tunnel. Nevzat walked backwards, bent over. I followed with my little flashlight, equally bent over. The tunnel circled around the kitchen, and we re-entered the room.
We made our way around the Uchisar hill, climbing, descending, not paying much attention to the snow. I took pictures like there’s no tomorrow, until, unfortunately my battery died about an hour into the tour. Where’s the charger? In Istanbul. Duh. When I get this problem solved, I’m going to hire Nevzat for another tour. And why not? This was the best 30YTL I’ve spent in a good long while.
Nevzat and I communicated quite well, even though my street Turkish doesn’t cover a lot of vocabulary and the accent is different than the one to which I am accustomed. I even think he got to kind of like me because the snow didn’t bother me, and I was adventurous.
He knew that I’m interested in churches and chapels, so these were our main goals. There are a surprising number of chapels in Uchisar, tiny ones carved into the upper parts of the fairy chimneys. Many are closed due to erosion, but we did manage to go into about 6 of them. Each one was a little surprise, tiny barrel vaults with apses, sometimes a bit of a dome, a small decoration carved in a ceiling. Some had graduated pillasters, niches for what I assume may have been icons or candles. One had a grave in the floor. One had regularly spaced incisions that reached the summit of the dome. These were painted directly on the stone in a burnt sienna color, nearly the same as the henna on my fingers. Needless to say, I was completely captivated.
The previous day, I had learned that a homeless man lives in one of the fairy chimneys underneath a reachable chapel. Homeless? This guy has a satellite dish on the exterior of his cave house. I peeked in the open door. It looked quite comfy cozy to me. This was one relatively easy chapel to reach as there is a staircase with a railing up half of the exterior. What kind of upset me was the rubbish he stored in the chapel, old cans, bits of beds, wood, bottles. And this was a lovely little one.
We looped around the Museum Hotel towards 1001 Nights hotel. There are a monastery and at least one chapel in the rock structure. This was the one scary part. We had to do a little rock climbing to reach the interior. Nevzat managed to get me in and out without a problem, though I admit to sliding on my backside to descend. I’m happy to say the climb was worth it. Each little chapel, not matter how small, has slight differences. This one is blackened on the inside. Recently I learned that fires were lit in many churches to deliberately cover the paintings in soot. Whether or not this church was indeed painted is difficult to say.
Down again, around more cave houses and fairy chimneys. There is a little tea house below. In the summer it must be beautiful. We sat out on the balcony and warmed ourselves in the sun. Despite the level of snow, we visited the one church I had found last year, near the shepherd’s cave. This is a larger carved structure, with a blackened apse and now blocked windows. One of the larger window frames is decorated with something I would love to have, a piece of wood with diagonally shaped holes carved in it. Many of these retain the original volcanic rocks that were pushed into them. This technique, of forcing rocks into wood is reminiscent of the duven, threshers, that I like so much. Yes, they’re tools, but I find then quite sculptural. Nevzat pointed out the hole in the ground near the apse/altar space that looks like a tandir. It’s actually a baptismal font. Last year, I had not noticed the bits of original Byzantine paintings that are barely visible: an outline of a saint here, a decorative motif there.
From the church, we climbed upwards towards the castle. I thought the tour was over, but no. Nevzat led me down some stairs, down a street, through a doorway and into the snow. We climbed to another chapel, this one next to a room recently used as a chicken coop. The rock itself was quite eroded, so much so that a large hole had formed. I regretted the camera problem because the sky was perfectly blue. It would have been a great photo.
We ended the tour with a cup of tea in Hasan’s cave store. I was invited to have hamsi, but I don’t think I’ll make it since I have at least one more lesson this evening. Due to the snow, we weren’t able to reach a few other places. Nevzat is happy to repeat and extend the tour next week.
Now I’m a bit sore from walking in the snow and caves for three hours. I’m not complaining.

Restaurant Theatre

Some days, I don’t have many chances to have great adventures. That's alright, because daily life here isn't so bad. At least an hour or two every day, we have what I call "Restaurant Theatre" with the wait staff. I even wrote a little script. We role-play; you're the waiter, he’s the customer. It can be pretty funny. Sometimes we snap our fingers and chant “What do you recommend?” It’s very musical. Some words are more challenging than others. For example, “Smoking section” has proven to be difficult to pronounce.

It’s refreshing to have motivated and enthusiastic students. It’s also rewarding to know that they have actually learned something and can apply it. The other night, French Mehmet (he speaks a little French. There are 8 Mehmets here. I get them all confused.) applied what he had learned while serving an American couple. He said "May I take your plate?" and “Would you like coffee or dessert?” I could have hugged him right there, but it wouldn't have been appropriate.

Snow and Scenery

Between lessons, I go for walks, sometimes alone and into Uchisar, sometimes with the manager, owner and their dogs. Together, we hike below the hotel and above some of the valleys. The snow is quite beautiful, especially on the low mountain range in the distance, or crystalline and fragile at close range. At some points, you can look over the valleys. Each one is different, depending on what is contained in the tufa. A high iron content can turn a valley pink or red when the sun hits at certain angles.

I can't describe to you how incredibly beautiful it is here in the snow. The light changes frequently. As the sun and clouds pass, and the shadows change, each view is a glorious photograph. Unfortunately, I cannot capture the subtlety of these changes with my camera.