Upon Visiting Cappadocia, Day Two

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On Friday morning, while taking breakfast outside (to the amazed horror of Omar because the temperature was OMG! cool), I was delighted to observe a huge, yellow-and-orange striped hot-air balloon pass overhead, huffing and wheezing. The basket must have held over 30 people. The winds in this area change direction as the air warms, so the balloons follow a circular path over this incredible landscape and return close enough to home for the tourists to land and be driven back to their hotels, while the balloons are deflated and returned by pickup truck to their starting sites.
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When the tour van arrived, it contained two couples from Brazil, another mother/daughter combination (Germans -- mom from Freiburg, daughter from Berlin, a history major), a guy from Nigeria working for a petroleum company in Turkey, two male Canadian companions from Quebec, who conversed in French, a hooded woman from Uzbekistan (who spoke perfect American English and lives with her mother in Doha, home of Aljazeera TV), me and Ali, the guide.
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(SIDE-NOTE: There is a peculiar territoriality that occurs when a group of people first enters an enclosed space, such as a classroom or a bus. Once a person initially chooses a place to sit, that becomes the place where they tend to sit whenever they return. During my school days, and extending into my college years, I liked to disrupt this silliness by taking one of the popular people’s seats whenever I arrived before them. The ensuing confusion was very amusing to observe. But, on a tour bus, where people tend to leave personal belongings on or below their seats, this was not possible. I sat in a single seat behind the Uzbeki woman.)
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After driving past many of the geological marvels I had seen the day before, we disembarked and began a 3km hike up to a plateau above the Rose Valley. (On tours, I like to stay as close to the guide as possible so I don’t miss any information, and so s/he might like me enough at the end to not expect a tip.) I was dismayed at how quickly I was gasping for air. My muscles were fine, but my respiration and heart-rate were desperate. The trail left no opportunities to stop and rest as we trudged upward through towering V-shaped walls of tuff. I was gasping for oxygen, but was not about to suffer the indignity of halting the progress of the serpentine line of tourists following me by collapsing on the trail. (This possibility, however, did enter my mind.) Once we finally reached an open space, I realized that there was no one behind me—I could have stopped at any time. I had been keeping pace with the guides who do this for a living, and the Germans who, like the Austrians and Swiss, think hiking up mountains is fun. Now that I had some time for wheezing cogitation, as the rest of the group finally managed to catch up to us, I realized that I had been scrambling uphill at over 10,000 feet above sea level. Gasping up here is OK.
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I was not impressed by the Rose Valley, so-called because of the layers of reddish pigmentation in the sedimentary walls of the cliffs. It was small beer compared to the Badlands of South Dakota. We walked on past, into and through many dwellings and chapels that had been dug out of the tuff, revealed now because of centuries of erosion, or still intact with weathered frescoes inside. Back in the van, we drove to a site that allowed tourists to enter one of the several underground cities created by the early Christians to protect themselves from the Romans and, later, the Turks. These people literally crawled into the embrace of the rock, emulating non-aggressive ants—they were communal, everyone had a specific job to do, and they were hard to wipe out.
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They protected the entrances to these underground cities in a very ingenious way. A large, circular stone was rolled into the entryway--a vertical aperture tall enough for a person of the period to enter easily. This stone was then rolled to the side of the entrance into a space carved out of the tuff, allowing easy access for the inhabitants. When danger approached, the stone was rolled into place and buttressed against ramming.
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Along the way, I noticed that most of the mosques did not have domes (autistics like things to be the same). I mentioned this to the Uzbek woman who sat in front of me, and she was similarly puzzled. After a while, she posited that they may be Sufi mosques, Sufis being the Muslim sect from which the famous “whirling dervishes” derive. I asked her how the Sufis had managed to escape the internecine struggles that are still plaguing the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. She replied that the Sufis believe that they have a unique connection with Allah (the dance of the dervishes is an expression of this spiritual connection) and if others choose another path to Him, that is fine with the Sufis. They only fight in self-defense.
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Once we entered the human ant hill, I knew I could not descend deeper than far enough to see what it offered at the upper levels -- defensive ante-chambers, living and storage spaces, temporary cemeteries, wineries and chapels. Every room was teeming with tourants, mostly Japanese. By the 2nd level down, my claustrophobia was screaming and I returned to the daylight. My fellow companions later reported that they wished they had followed my example, because after the 2nd level the dark corridors became smaller and smaller, warmer and warmer, and began to reek of nervous perspiration, and there was nothing new to see but smaller examples of what had been carved out nearer the surface.
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The next stop was a factory featuring semi-precious stones, but specializing in onyx. We were ushered into a workshop where an elderly smith sat before a stone lathe. He locked a rectangular block of onyx into the device, and then began noisily scaling away layers of stone chips. Eventually, he created a beautiful stone egg the color of thick honey, polished to perfection, standing on a coarse pedestal, this being the only remnant of the original block of onyx. I was very impressed because it was all done manually -- no buttons were pushed other than On and Off.
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After this demonstration, we were herded into a large jewelry store, with precious stones displayed in every fashion -- necklaces, earrings, etc. Our group was led to another demonstration intended to whet our appetites so that we would buy something. My rug merchant antipathy was on high alert. However, after having given her spiel, the hostess asked if anyone could answer the question, “What does ‘Cappadocia’ mean?” Since I had been making taking mental notes for this Istanbullet all day, I immediately blurted out the answer that Ali had said that very morning, “Place of beautiful horses.” I now own the onyx egg described above.
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Our last stop was Pigeon Valley. Because Cappadocia is basically a bunch of volcanic rocks, the inhabitants had to create food. To do so, they needed fertilizer. Hence the pigeons. There are thousands of pigeon coops carved into the hillsides. Anyone who has ever visited a major metropolitan area knows that pigeons = poop. In Cappadocia, pigeon poop was encouraged. Now, the wines from Cappadocia are considered Turkey’s finest, all due to guano.
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Back at the hotel, while sitting reading outside in the cool (meaning I was alone) fading evening light, two workmen arrived. Their job was to attach rope lights to the metal latticework that held grape vines above where I was sitting. I can imagine that the eventual effect will be quite lovely. During this procedure, Omar brought them tea, then a plate of biscuits, and then a plate of orange slices -- Turkish hospitality. Turks are lovely people I will miss very much.
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