Days in Gőreme (Cappadocia)

• The side roads are often the most interesting. We’ve spent the day looking at the ceiling frescoes of 4th to 11th century Christian cave churches near Gőreme, certainly stunningly beautiful in their way. But what I remember above all this evening are two other moments:
• Making our way back to Gőreme, we see two retired aged men off in a rough, flat, dusty field picking … something. We decide to head across the field to find out. It’s grapes from low bushes they’ve been tending. They’ll make wine, a widespread practice in the area, and maybe store extra grapes into the winter, both white and ‘black’, beneath their floorboards. They cut off and hand us a bunch, encouraging us to try them. And yes, they’re sweet, cool in the late afternoon, and delicious. Before we wish them well, we’re carrying off yet another bunch, tomorrow’s lunch.
• A little further along down our dusty road, a tractor and colourfully painted wagon appears with several village women and youths. Everyone’s in a good mood, talking and laughing, they’re excited, anticipating something they’ll enjoy. They pull into a small field thick with squash, some the size of watermelon, some like grapefruit – then jump down and begin throwing the produce into the wagon. We then remember seeing several women early this morning cracking open the same type of quash, expertly extracting and saving the seeds (they’ll be dried and sold as snacks: ‘chick-chicks’?), then throwing the cracked husks into a quickly mounting pile. Up in the field, the women welcome Betty’s offer off help, one showing her how to snap off the dried vine from each squash with her foot and heave them up into the wagon. Together, the women and the youths and children, its quick work and not long before we’re waving goodbye, hardly a word understood between us, apart from merhaba, hello, and hoşçakal, goodbye.
• A footnote to the squash picking. In a cobbled stone yard covered in these same drying squash seeds, men and women appear one day with a tractor, thresher, short brooms and many sacks. For hours into the dark mid-evening, the women bend low, sweeping and sweeping the seeds into sacks which are then emptied in the thresher, the chaff blowing across the square, down lanes and up to our balcony, the cleaner seeds gathered in sacks eventually to be hauled away. No matter how late they work, the work is not done. The next day they return, sweeping and sweeping as if they must collect every seed! Then the brooms and bags and other tools are all gathered, small scraps up picked up here and there, and off they go, as if all this had never happend.
• The land forms in this area are unusual and for eons have invited humans to use the earth in unique ways to respond to their needs. The landscape is arid, sandy, full of gorges,pinnacles, curvaceous ivory and dusty rose coloured cliff walls of soft volcanic ash. Once volcanoes blanketed the region with ash which solidified into an easily eroding material called tuff, which is overlain in many places by harder volcanic rock. As this hard cap erodes and fissures open, cave and capped columns start to form (generally called ‘fairy chimneys’ – they’ve always been called this, we are told, but it maybe be just as possible that it was a now forgotten marketing idea in the early days of tourism here). In fact, depending on the stage of erosion, they appear like fantastic mushrooms, gigantic phalluses or inverted cones reaching some 40 metres.
• For many centuries the soft tuff and it natural caves have been used to create dwellings, dovecotes and churches, all of which are seen as you walk through nearby gorges. In fact whole underground communities were once created, sometimes with five to eight stories deep of living quarters, storage, stables, ventilation systems, churches, wells and great stone wheels that could seal entranceways in case of danger. How permanently people (all early Christians) lived in these, or whether mostly in times of attack is unclear to us. Today some people still living in dwellings built into the tuff cones and cliff faces, with hydro lines running from the stone, often a car parked somewhere close by, and a satellite dish sprouting from the top. Tourism – and its plentiful here – has led to the creation of hotels with actual and contrived cave rooms (like the Flintstone Hotel), big sellers but reportedly often musty, airless and dark.
• Today we walked for several hours through one gorge, from Gőreme where we are staying to a nearby town. Nothing is signposted, beyond the start, and the gorges are full of side canyons and deadends, We likely explored most by happenstance, finally meeting a guide who showed us our way (he and several walkers the only people we met), and reaching our destination in about four rather than two hours. But there is nothing like walking to have you feeling, internally, the nature of the land, its heat, its ups and down and turns, its broader shapes and ancient shaping, the textures of what it’s made from. Sometimes we followed cool, almost dry streambeds or moved through natural tunnels, sometimes we crossed or climbed basalt crests, then suddenly (many times over) we found ourselves in small hidden apple orchards with brilliant red fruit (oh yes, several got into our packs) and grape vines with sweet dark purple fruit. Finally our destination, the hilltop village of Üçhisar, an enclave of French tourism set alongside Cappadocian village life – a fringed scarf for Betty bought from a woman making these in her cave-cum-brick house, a plate of pide and a drink, then the bus home. A good day.
• A memorable day wandering in and between cave churches with their spectacular frescoes near Gőreme. The churches themselves are most unusual. Cut into the soft tuff and built as part of a community and monastery complex from the 4thC on, the churches imitate Byzantium architectural styles – vaulted ceilings, columns, atriums, transverse naves – complete with features that, inside the cave, have no practical function. Inside many, the complete ceilings and upper walls are covered with frescoes mostly depicting well known key scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Many of the figures follow stereotypes of the time. It is other elements that get my attention, like the attention to drape – the folds and shadows and flow – of cloaks and dresses down the bodies whose major skeletal elements (shoulders, hips, knees) are felt visible through the clothing.
• Many of the animals – donkeys, sheep, goats,cows, horses (Cappadocia means ‘land of the well bed horses’) – are energetic and sometimes comical in their angularity, facial expressiveness and unmistakably (and curiously) direct stares back to the viewer.
  Then there’s the colourful detailing on the fabric and shoes and stocking of the wealthy, like the three wise men, how painters have taken advantage of the curved surfaces to add movement and energy to the human interaction, the references to ordinary life (like the polled coracles on water), Grabriel again floating, flying across the domes, the exceptional but remarkable individuation in the eyes and cheeks and nose of one women whispering to another, the combinations of gold, scarlet, burgundy, indigo and brilliant blue paints, the latter apparently created from rare azurite.
• A day later I find myself marveling at the glorious expressiveness in the details and colours and flowing movement of all this colourful picture-making, story-telling, sense of celebration deep inside these dim earthen caves with their tiny doors and openings surrounded outside by the dusty, demanding earth that yet, with care, issues the reddest of apples and the sweetest grapes.