I say in theory because you don’t have to live here long before you realize that in practice the rules only apply to the hoteliers and people undertaking major restoration projects. However when it comes to your average Göremeli making so-called “improvements” to their home, the bureaucrats in charge of the rulebook seem to have a complete blind spot.The results can be heart-breaking. There are in effect two Göreme villages: the old part made up of four mahalles (neighborhoods) of cave-houses tucked into a curve of rock, and the new part made up of two mahalles where all the buildings postdate 1950. Of course the conservation rules only apply to the old mahalles, but that doesn’t stop a few shysters from trying to push the boundaries. In 2000, just after I bought my own property, someone tore down an old cave-house and started to rebuild from scratch right inside the conservation zone. It was not an easily missable overnight job. Nor was it done without loving attention to (inappropriate) detail. However the end result was a house more suited to an Ankara suburb squatting amid the caves.
During work on this monstrosity I would walk across the mahalle’s main square where the stone masons were hard at work every day. Every day they would call out “Is it beautiful, abla?” and every day I would retort “No it’s not!” The exchange was light-hearted but the smiles disguised gritted teeth.
Eventually the new house was finished. The conservation supremos were coming to take photos of my property and to tell me what I could do to it. As they walked past the Monster House with eyes averted I blurted out: “What about this? They’ve completely destroyed an old building.”
“At least it’s clean,” the man with the clipboard replied sheepishly.
There is in my mahalle one particularly prominent building with a single room that juts up into the landscape. “The men used to come here to drink tea and smoke,” Tilki, the Dutch ex-architect, told me, although when he and I visited we found it full of stored grapes and piles of yufka (flat bread).
One morning I stepped onto my terrace to see workmen on top of this room ripping down its parapet so that they could fix the roof. A quick phone call ensured that they replaced the stones afterwards but it didn’t make much difference because the next day when I looked out a hole had been punched through the wall and a white PVC door inserted. The lovely old wooden window-frames had gone the way of PVC too.
From the terrace of the Kelebek Pension that evening I gazed out in misery and ranted about the damage so mindlessly done. Beside me a tourist gently joshed me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “When you die I’ll see that they put ‘May all her windows be wooden!’ on your tombstone.”
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
