But the great thing about living in a renowned beauty spot is that you are also ready and waiting whenever anything happens that can reawaken that original enchantment. So it was last week when fate deposited 50 centimeters of snow on Cappadocia in the space of just two days. Last summer my friends Ali and Mehmet had bought horses and taken up riding in the valleys. Then 10 days ago Ali’s horse gave birth to a foal.
“Let’s go and look at it,” I suggested, and so we drove out through a landscape that had been transformed almost out of recognition. Snow lay on the ground in deep drifts, snow laced the branches like cherry blossom, and snow rippled gently down the sides of the fairy chimneys.
I don’t know what I had been expecting but it came as a delightful surprise when, as in a fairy tale, a door in a rock swung open to reveal a cave stable. Inside four adult horses were dining out of stone mangers just like the ones in my dining room. More to the point, perhaps, they were just like the ones in the underground cities. I was staring at something that looked (and smelled) very much like the upper layer of Derinkuyu must have in its heyday.
The foal was small and brown and wobbly on his feet, his mother ferociously attentive. We fed the other horses carrots, then watched in amazement as they dashed outside and rolled on their backs with their legs in the air, relishing the thick blanket of whiteness just as much as we did.
This being Göreme, we were soon shinnying up a dodgy staircase to a rock-cut hideaway where a set of antlers had been requisitioned as a hat-stand. As tea brewed on the stove, I inspected two soot-blackened arches at the rear of the cave.
“This must have been a chapel once,” I said thoughtfully.
“It was a place for making wine,” Ekrem replied.
“First a chapel, then a place for making wine, then a stable and now a tea-house!” I laughed.
Through the window we watched pigeons flutter from snow-covered rock to snow-covered rock.
“They’re kumru pigeons,” Ekrem told me. “They make a special sound -- one thin note, one deep note and one normal one.”
“Pop, classical and jazz!” Ali translated.
We laughed and sipped our tea, then slithered back home again. I was as high as a kite on the magic of the scenery. In less than an hour I’d fallen head over heels in love with Göreme all over again.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
