I hurry dutifully down the hill with my back copies of Today’s Zaman, but even as I do so, I’m thinking that no one could really accuse a Göremeli of wastefulness because here every bottle, jar and newspaper is used, used and used again, until it breaks or falls apart.I hadn’t been living in Göreme long when I arrived home to find my neighbor Hatice hovering in front of my then rented house. We exchanged a few pleasantries. Then she asked me, “Can I borrow a cassette?”
I was a little taken aback by this request, not having had Hatice down for much of a party animal. “But of course,” I replied and took her indoors where I threw open a cupboard to reveal a selection of Sezen Aksu, Haluk Levent and Zülfü Livaneli tapes.
Hatice looked at them blankly. “Go ahead, take one,” I said encouragingly.
Then she threw back her head and roared with laughter. “Not kaseteler (cassettes), Pat. Gazeteler (newspapers)!”
Chastened, I rushed into the kitchen and came back with a pile of old Guardians (these were the days when I could still afford to buy them). “What do you want them for?” I asked.
“The bottom of the budgie’s cage,” she replied.
Since then I’ve discovered the many other uses for old newspapers. That they come in handy for lining shelves and drawers is boringly predictable. What is less predictable is that they also make nifty temporary tablecloths, which is great for me since it means I can reread forgotten news items during lulls in lunchtime conversation.
During August, the sun was blazing down and I had started to worry that I would contract food-poisoning from chicken left unrefrigerated in the heat. When I confessed my fears to another neighbor, Ayşe, she took me downstairs to inspect her old fridge. I was just about to say that I planned to buy a new one when she threw open the door and proudly displayed its contents -- her stash of my cast-off newspapers.
In rural Anatolia every old jar is reused to store homemade pekmez (molasses), turşu (pickles) or salça (tomato sauce). Every old pot and kettle finds a new life as decoration for the walls of a pension. And no one ever throws away anything combustible, which means that I’ve watched in horror as old bread-making tables, cartwheels and other relics of a vanishing lifestyle were consigned to the flames.
The one fly in the ointment is plastic. Local shoppers like to conceal their purchases from their neighbors, which means that everything, even a newspaper, tends to get put into plastic bags. The result is predictable -- nests of plastic in the trees and rafts of plastic in the streams.
Who knows? Perhaps the recycling scheme will see off such eyesores. It’s certainly a start, anyway.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
