So when I moved to Göreme it took some time to adjust to the necessarily three-pronged local approach to shopping, which goes something like this. First we scour the shelves of the local dükkan. Then we head for Nevşehir. Then when Nevşehir also lets us down, we try Kayseri, an hour away by bus.Kayseri is also our last port of call in veterinary crises and last week found me hotfooting it to the vet school after a local clinician bungled a routine spaying operation. The vet school vet is both encouraging and discouraging, but at last he sends me on my way, whereupon my first thought is to indulge in a little retail therapy at the new Kayseri Park shopping mall. Instead I find my legs turning as if of their own accord toward the Tavukcu Mahalle.
On the surface Kayseri is a big, modern town whose historic monuments -- the old city walls and innumerable Selçuk mosques, medreses and tombs -- look increasingly lost amid the high-rise evidence of a booming local economy. In such circumstances the Tavukcu Mahalle looks like the place that time forgot.
In the late 19th century Tavukcu was a flourishing Armenian neighborhood full of sturdy stone mansions whose interiors boasted magnificent displays of local carpentry. But the passing years have been cruel to it. Some of the houses fell victim to would-be treasure hunters in the 1920s; others were asset stripped more recently to supply the burgeoning market for reclaimed home fittings. The death knell was a brand-new road that slashed through the mahalle. I had stumbled upon its dejected remnants almost by accident while hunting, would you believe it, for reclaimable iron railings to adorn my Göreme home.
It’s a sunny day and snow still lingers on the ground. In their heyday many of the houses were painted bright blues, reds and yellows, and even in ruins they make a vivid splash of color against the wintry landscape. But nowadays this is a dirt-poor district where a foreign face is a rarity. Eventually someone beckons me inside a magnificent old mansion. Reused as a butcher’s, it reeks of stale blood and at the top of the curvy staircase a crop-eared kangal dog eyes me warily, its legs neatly crossed in front of it like a ballet dancer’s. Beside it a deep red fresco unravels like old wallpaper.
Now that it’s almost too late the authorities have started work on restoration. Seeing me weighing up their work, Mehmet Usta rushes to show me the old church half-hidden behind a lofty wall. We ring the bell and are politely dismissed by the custodian. But I’d visited in 2002 and, turning away, I remember the glittering altarpiece that lurks inside, a splendid, sad reminder of a Tavukcu now gone forever.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme 
