Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 17:39:28 +0200 (WET)
Subject: Cappadocia
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We had the hotel to ourselves for our first two nights in
Cappadocia.  Several other groups showed up for our third
and final night.  One of these groups was a couple of
middle-aged Americans on their first visit to Turkey.  I
overheard them at dinner.  The man told the hostess about a
stroll in the village that afternoon.  The couple had met a
young boy named Mustafa, who tried out his few words of
English on the tourists.  They went to a tea-house with him,
where they were treated as guests in the proper sense: they
were not permitted to pay for their tea.

I heard the man tell the story two more times at breakfast
the next morning.  He had been amazed by the hospitality of
Turkish people.  Then I met Mustafa for myself, or another
boy of that name, along with two of his friends.  One of the
friends explained to me I was going to burn in hell for
being a Christian.  (He used Turkish, throwing in the
English word "hot" to make sure I understood.)

The boys and I were standing in a narrow stream valley,
whose walls, centuries ago, had been carved out to make
dwellings, some for Christian monks.  Some of the villagers
still used those dwellings, at least for livestock and
storage.

A nearby village had housed well-to-do Christians, until
they were all shipped to Greece during the population
exchanges of the 1920s.

Orthodox Christmas fell during our visit to Cappadocia.  It
was a poignant event for one of us.  Sasha had been my
spouse's ph.d. advisor in England, but was originally from
Siberia.  He and Ayse continue to collaborate on
mathematical research; they also now share two Turkish
students.  These students came along to Cappadocia, along
with a friend who is now on the faculty at our university in
Ankara, and his girlfriend.

So we were seven, and on a rainy Thursday afternoon, January
5, 2006, we took two taxis from our university to Ankara's
enormous bus terminal, for our 15.00 ride to Ürgüp via
Nevsehir.  At 16.30 we had a half-hour break at a facility
called Kapadokya, where we ate gözleme (sheets of dough
folded around cheese or other filling and fried on a
griddle).  At 20.00 we reached Nevsehir and packed into a
smaller bus, which made drop-offs at Göreme and Avanos
before leaving us at Ürgüp.  There a van from the Gamirasu
Hotel in the town of Ayvali met us; we reached the hotel
around 21.00.

It was unfortunate for our guest from abroad that most of
our trip had to be in darkness.  Perhaps Sasha did not mind;
he spent most of the trip talking mathematics with the
students.  The headlights of the van to the hotel did give
some hint of the remarkable geography that we would be
living in for the next few days.  But I always enjoy bus
trips in Turkey anyway.  The side windows let me the sky; I
am also tall enough to see out the front window; the seats
are comfortable; and we are on our way to somewhere
interesting.

A Turkish bus is like an airplane:  there is an attendent
who brings tea and snacks periodically.  When I first came
to Turkey, the bus attendants would also shake out dashes of
cologne into the cupped hands of passengers.  I enjoyed this
ritual, and was sorry when most companies switched to
moistened towels in foil packs.  But the Nevsehir company
that we used for this last trip is still using real cologne
in a bottle.

A bus trip takes you away from the crowds of the cities into
wide open spaces.  On this trip, after dark, I either slept,
or read from Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_
about the baptism of Clovis and the establishment of a
French monarchy.

The Gamirasu Hotel <http://www.gamirasu.com/> is built from
an old Byzantine monastery.  Probably some of the hotel is
new, like the room given to Ayse and me: this was
in a free-standing stone building with a vaulted ceiling.
Some other rooms were in caves.

The thing about Cappadocia is that it was once covered by
layers of volcanic ash.  It seems you can easily dig into
the ash, once a hole is started; then, in time, the exposed
surfaces harden.  A child can built sand-castles at the
beach; in Cappodocia, grown-ups can build castles to live
in, with some of the same techniques.

The problem is that the grown-up-size castles are not much
more durable than sand-castles.  Almost every sloping
surface in Cappadocia has holes, dug some time over the last
few thousand years.  Often those holes had been intended for
access to an *inner* room.  Then the outer wall of the outer
room collapsed, some time in the ensuing centuries.  One
such collapse in the Zelve Valley in the 1950s killed two
people; alternative above-ground accommodation was found for
the remaining troglodytes there, and the valley became a
park, with the areas judged more dangerous fenced off.

We would visit Zelve on Saturday.  On Thursday night, we ate
in our hotel's cave dining room, next to a toasty wood-fired
stove and a Christmas tree.  We arranged with the hostess to
hire a driver and a guide for the next two days; the guide
would plan an itinerary with us.

We did the planning at breakfast next morning in an adjacent
cave room.  Our first stop was an underground city like
those apparently mentioned by Xenophon in the _Anabasis._ (I
haven't read this, but it is on my list now.)

First we drove past potato-fields; the hills behind the
fields had doors in them leading to warehouses hollowed out
from the rock.

Our guide Remzi explained it all.  He certainly seemed to
enjoy his work.  Giving us the motor-mouth symbol with his
hand, he told us he would be explaining things to us all
day: there was so much to talk about in Cappadocia.

We walked past numerous stalls of trinkets in order to reach
the entrance to Kaymakli ("Creamy") underground city.  But
we were the only tourists around.  We bought our tickets to
the caves and went down several floors, having to crouch
very low to traverse some passages.  Remzi Bey pointed out
kitchens, storage areas, an air shaft, a well.  Everything
is well lit with electricity, and you can imagine living
there, until you think about how the place would have been
illuminated hundreds of years ago.  You would be there only
because invading armies were overhead.  You would not want
smoke from fires to be seen...

This trip was my second to Cappadocia.  My first had been in
the fall of 1998, when I went with my mother while Ayse was
teaching.  (I wasn't working then.)  The first time, I just
enjoyed the fascination of what people could do with the
right kind of stone.  This time, Cappodocia had the air of
people close to the edge.  You wouldn't live in a house that
could collapse on you, with little or no natural light,
unless you had no choice.

Life may have been good when the region was defended by the
Roman Army and supplied fine horses for the nobility of
Constantinople.

With my mother, I had seen the *other* major excavated
underground city of Cappadocia, called Derinkuyu ("Deep
Well").  I had also seen the Ihlara Valley, which was our
next stop on Friday.  I cannot imagine a more beautiful
place.  The valley is a rift in the earth with a river
running through, watering trees and grass.  The valley walls
are cliffs, in which Christians dug churches and
monasteries, often *after* the Muslim Seljuk Turks had taken
power; the Seljuks tolerated People of the Book, it seems.

Some of the churches have crude geometric designs on their
walls, painted by Iconoclasts; others have frescoes of
saints, or of Jesus.  Sometimes eyes or whole heads of these
have been scratched out.  I used to think the scratching had
always been done by devout Muslims opposed to depictions of
holy beings.  But Remzi Bey suggested that a devout
*Christian* with an eye disease might scratch out the eyes
of a fresco saint in order to make a healing potion.  It was
a plausible explanation.  One fresco we saw later had
carefully scratched-out *feet.*

The frescoes in Ihlara Valley are reachable by anybody who
pays the small entrance fee to the valley.  Some people
today scratch their initials in the painted plaster.  One of
the students was quite shocked at this.  I was too, but we
were in a country filled with all kinds of ancient stuff. It
would be expensive to keep guards at the churches, and
unpleasant to lock up the churches.

I should like to see posted messages from Muslim leaders
about the respect due to People of the Book (if not to all
people).  On the other hand, Turkey is a country where
people light up cigarettes beneath No Smoking signs; words
from authorities may not mean much.

We walked along the river among the trees---and among the
boulders that had fallen from the valley walls.  Many of the
trees are coppiced periodically for firewood; also, after a
while, we reached a ploughed field.  Animals must do the
work, as well as any transport of produce to the outside
world.

Road access was made only some four kilometers into our
walk.  There was a village, Belisirma, with a few
restaurants by the river, most seemingly closed for the
season.  One was open, and the people there agreed to put
tables outside for us, in the sunshine.  Though there was
some snow on the ground, we were warm from our walk.  We had
salad, meat or menemen (scrambled eggs with tomatoes and
peppers), and Efes beer in half-liter bottles.  What could
be more pleasant, than to walk by a flowing stream, then sit
with a beer, and the sun on one's face, in January?

At the end of our meal, the sun dipped below the rim of the
valley, and we piled into the van that was waiting for us.
We drove around to the end of the valley, to the village of
Selime.  There we could poke around a cliff face carved full
of rooms going up several floors.

Sometimes, for various reasons, the volcanic tuff in
Cappadocia has formed cones and pillars.  There was such an
eminence at Selime, all hollowed out inside.  The floor of
its upper room had holes into the lower room.  The holes
were not supposed to be there.  How sound *was* that floor?
How much stress did a room full of tourists place on it?  I
wondered whether engineers ever looked at these places.
Our one EU citizen, Sasha (now carrying UK passport) laughed
at this possibility.

Remzi Bey had expressed wishes that Turkey would join the
EU, so that more archeological projects could be funded.
Sasha thought the current situation preferable for this, and
that all of the sites we were visiting would be off limits
under EU rules.  (Also, our university in Ankara would be
closed down for lack of handicapped access;  I have seen
people moving around here on motorized wheelchairs, but it
is not easy.)

Our last stop for the day was Agzikarahan, a great Seljuk
caravansaray, built to accommodate merchants on the Silk
Road.  In the middle of its courtyard, raised on pillars, is
the mescit; one can climb to its roof.  (A mescit is a small
mosque, a "chapel".  Perhaps it is technically distinguished
from a mosque by not having a Friday sermon.  But the word
"mescit" is cognate with our "mosque".)

We were returned to our hotel in the dark.  After dinner
there, Sasha brought out the bottle of Laphroaig whisky that
he had carried from Britain.

Saturday was overcast and rainy.  The sites to be visited
were closer together.  First was the Göreme Open Air Museum,
a collection of cave churches and communal residences (where
one can sit, for example, at a long stone dining table).

We drove on, stopping to look down into the valley above
Göreme.  Here the walls are not so tall or steep as in the
Ihlara valley.  The rock is softer, seeming quite close to
wet sand.  The valley floor features rock pillars (hollowed
out by humans) surrounded by vineyards.  Idyllic.  It might
have been in such a place that the French farmer settled
whom we had seen on Turkish TV: he had paid a visit and
fallen in love with the land.

One more stop before lunch: Uçhisar, "Point castle". (Some
books say Üçhisar, but that would mean "Three castle".)
The castle was not built up, but rather hollowed out of an
existing rock.  Probably the internal stairs are no
longer safe; an eternal stairway leads to spectacular views
from the top.

Lunch was in an old Greek house in Ürgüp town and was
disappointing, if only because one person's meal was not
served before the rest of us had finished ours.  We were the
only customers.  The dining room had the same vaulted
ceiling that Ayse and I had in our bedroom in Ayvali: it
wasn't quite round, like a Roman arch;  it wasn't pointed,
like a Gothic arch; what was it?  Remzi Bey called it an
"Ottoman arch".

Sasha observed that an arch can be constructed with convex
blocks and no mortar, as long as the ends are properly
secured.  He claimed that an "inverse arch", bending down
rather than up, could be constructed under the same
conditions.  Lying in bed early on Sunday morning, I figured
out how to do it.  (Hints available on request.)

Sasha claimed that convexity was an "intuitive"
mathematical concept.  (A body is convex if, whenever you
pick two points inside the body, the line segment joining
them lies entirely inside the body.)  I asked for an example
of a non-intuitive concept, and he proposed "Hopf algebras".
I had to ask what they were.  I will allow that they are
harder to define than convex bodies.

Some of the rock cones in Cappodocia have been formed
because hard boulders once sat on top of the volcanic ash.
Rain washed away the ash that was *not* beneath the
boulders, leaving behind the pillars called "fairy chimneys"
(peri bacalari).  After lunch we visited an area called
Devrent Valley where we could wander among these chimneys.
I wandered ahead, while Remzi Bey told the others what he
thought each pillar looked like (a seal, a one-humped camel,
a two-humped camel, the Virgin Mary...).  When he found me
later, he insisted on repeating his assessments to me.  The
motor-mouth sign he had given the previous morning had not
necessarily been a good sign.  But I still found him
interesting.  He has at least one child at university in the
US, and he had given lectures in the US himself.  I think he
knew what he was talking about somewhat better than the
young tour guides we get for the excursions at our annual
Antalya Algebra Days meeting.

Remzi Bey was probably confused on one point though.  The
fairy chimneys in Devrent Valley were too small and soft to
be hollowed out practically for shelter.  Our next stop was
Pasabagi, "Pasha's Vineyard", where the chimneys *could*
make dwellings.  Remzi Bey said Saint Simeon Stylites had
lived there, when I'm pretty sure he spent his life around
Antioch.  It so happened that I had been reading Gibbon's
supercilious comments on Saint Simeon, who spent years atop
a pillar.  Perhaps the monks of the Pasha's Vineyard had
been *inspired* by the saint.  Today you can climb to the
cell of one of them by means of footholds in a vertical
shaft.  I did this seven years ago, though the guide then
discouraged it; this year, Remzi Bey encouraged it, and five
of us ascended.

In the fading light we visited Zelve Valley, which I
mentioned at the beginning.  It was after dark when we got
to Mustafapasha, the formerly Greek village that I also
mentioned.  We went there because our department chair had
recently praised its beauty.  Its above-ground houses of
dressed stone did bespeak wealth.  Remzi Bey spoke sadly of
the population exchanges that had driven abroad the owners
of the houses (they were then assigned by lottery to Muslims
from Greece).  Remzi Bey told of how the grandson of one of
those owners had come from Greece recently to see his
grandfather's house, on a tour that Remzi Bey had been
involved in.

One complaint I had with Remzi Bey's talk was his reference
to the Turkish invaders of Anatolia as "our ancestors".  I
think the genes of all peoples who have ever lived here
remain here.  The people called "Turk" are Hittite, Greek,
Armenian,---Phrygian, Urartian, Galatian,---as well as Turk.
This may be an exaggeration in any one case; still, I am
told that, if you take a group of Mediterraneans, you cannot
tell what country they are from by looking at their genes.

Remember the boy who said Christians were bound for hell?  I
explained that my name was David, or "Davut" in Turkish.  He
knew the name, and said the original David had been Muslim;
how could he have been Jewish (as I said) if he had prayed
to Allah?

I asked the boy how he knew about what he was telling me; he
said the Koran.  I said that the Koran was a book, and there
were many books.

The Koran was unique among books, said the boy. By this
time, some of my companions had arrived, and they could say
things I struggled to express in Turkish.  How did the boy
know the Koran was special?  His grandfather had told him.
Ayse pointed out, If everybody in this country is just like
his grandfather, how will this country move forward?

I hope we haven't made the villagers angry that a hotel for
infidels has been founded in their midst.

We walked back downstream to the hotel, packed our things,
and reversed the steps by which we had arrived.

David Pierce sf 87