An architectural school dropout, he fell in love with the crumbling cave-houses sprinkled amongst the fairy chimneys. And he it was who came upon the most dramatically crumbling of them all, the Mehmet Paşa Konağı.Built for a 19th-century regional governor, this is by far the stateliest of homes in the village, with a fine frescoed selamlık (men’s room) and haremlik (women’s room) which perfectly reflect the different worlds of Ottoman men and women. The walls of the men’s room are decorated with pictures of mosques, of guns, of the outside world. Those of the women’s have paintings of fruit and flowers, images more suited to their cloistered existence.
When Tilki found the mansion its roof had already started to cave in and those same frescoes were exposed to the air. He was a man before his time and his is an epic story of struggle and disappointment -- struggle to get permission to repair and restore the building, then disappointment when he couldn’t find a use for it that would generate an income.
When I arrived in Göreme, the Mehmet Paşa Konağı functioned sporadically as a restaurant. There Tilki and I dined in grand style in the selamlık while he ran through a tale so complicated it took a full three courses to digest it.
“And now they say it’s 25 percent too small to be a restaurant!” he concluded, gesticulating at the paintings with his knife. “What am I supposed to do? Knock down one of these walls to make it bigger?”
That was 1998, but almost nine years later he is still no nearer to a solution and the mansion stands on its bluff overlooking the new part of town, its shutters closed, its front door panel broken. The contents have long since been sold off to pay Tilki’s debts.
Of course there are other fine frescoed houses elsewhere in Cappadocia, especially in Ürgüp (the old Prokopi) and Mustafapaşa (the old Sinasos). There, unexpected images of men and women on the walls of private homes serve as ghostly reminders of the Greek owners who left in the 1924 population exchange.
But 19th-century Göreme didn’t have a Greek population and the Mehmet Paşa Konağı was its one glimpse of urban sophistication (the artist responsible for the frescoes is said to have had a hand in a Topkapı Palace dining room, too). By rights it should be the pride and joy of the village, open to the public like Safranbolu’s wonderful Ottoman houses.
Instead Tilki battles on. The pension he created in the 1980s has been swallowed up into the grand new Anatolian Houses hotel. Somewhere along the way he has also acquired a $10,000 water bill. And so the saga rolls on.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
