When describing its location to younger villagers I tend to say that mine is the house opposite the mosque with the cat-flap in the gate. To anyone over 50 I just say “it was Kevenci Hoca’s house” and that suffices.Göreme has six mosques, four of them old and two of them new. When I first came here I used to love lying in bed in the early hours of the morning listening to the ezan being relayed from one minaret to the next. The sound was like a lullaby, its last notes lingering on the air like perfume. No matter that it didn’t get me out of bed, it still got my day off to an excellent start.
Since then, however, the live voices have been replaced with recordings, some of them pleasant if raucous, some of them just plain loud. Last year during a prolonged power cut, the muezzin climbed onto the roof to sing the ezan. It was a magical moment but no sooner had he disappeared again than I realized how clearly he had proved the case for the loudspeakers, because, aside from myself and my neighbor, I doubt if anyone else had heard his efforts.
Last year “my” mosque was restored. With its pretty triple-arched portico, it makes a distinctive local landmark. However, the same could have been said of its twin in the adjoining neighbourhood and that had not saved it from a “restoration” that effectively demolished its fragile beauty. Citing the need for greater warmth, whoever was responsible chose to stone up the triple arches to the mid-point and then close the upper portions with windows. The end result was a mess.
Fortunately my mosque was treated with greater sensitivity. The whitewash concealing its honey-gold stonework was stripped off and the PVC window-frames were replaced with wooden ones. I’m pleased to be able to report that it looks even prettier than it did before.
During the restoration of my house I came across all sorts of religious paraphernalia. Most interesting were two long strips of paper covered with Arabic inscriptions interspersed between pictures of the Ka’aba, a sword, a scorpion and a snake.
“Do you know what these are?” I asked the Nevşehir picture framer who shook his head sadly.
Later he asked a hoca. “They’re prayer strips,” he said. “The pictures were to offer protection in the home.”
Then one day the electrician was chatting to me in the doorway. Suddenly he reached up and pulled some screwed-up pieces of paper out of a hole above the door. “Hazine!” (treasure) he said, before going on to explain how, in the past, no piece of paper with Arabic written on it could ever be thrown away in case it came from a Koran.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme, Cappadocia.
