Ever since I came here there have been rumblings about drumming up outside funding to save some of the old troglodyte homes. Tilki, the Dutch ex-architect, also nurtures a dream of turning old Göreme into an open-air museum whose residents would walk around in costumes handing out servings of home-cooked mantı and other local delicacies. Something like Colonial Williamsburg in the US, in fact, although I have yet to hear any of the tea-drinking ladies suggest that this is a future they would rate more highly than a quick escape to a Nevşehir apartment.In the absence of financial help from the outside, what has actually happened is that many of the old cave houses have been turned into pensions or hotels. Only two families continue to live in the Gafalı Mahallesi, and their homes are stranded amid a sea of hotels. When I asked a friend’s sister-in-law Emete how she felt about this, she simply shrugged in the accepting way of local women. However, as I turned to go, she couldn’t help muttering wistfully, “I have no neighbors to talk to,” because of course the women’s old sitting-on-doorsteps-chatting culture has gone the way of the donkey carts that used to rattle along the cobbled streets.
My house is in a mahalle that is hanging onto its residential status by the skin of its teeth. Even so, every season there are more and more hotels, and it’s quite possible that in five to 10 years there will be no local residents, costumed or otherwise, apart from the foreigners who have modernized some of the cave houses.
At the same time there has been a slow accumulation of ugliness about the village as people built breezeblock walls, threw cement washes over stones, and replaced old wooden gates with metal grilles.
Enter the Committee for the Removal of Incidental Ugliness. It’s taken a year to push the paperwork through but finally Göreme has its own charity (technically the Göreme Cultural and Natural Treasures Protection Society), which aims to make small, low-cost improvements to the visual environment. In particular, the idea is to ask the owners of breezeblock walls if we can replace them with natural stones.
It’s in its early days, and we have yet to accumulate any funds or persuade anyone to let us wield a sledgehammer. However, for the first time I am quietly confident that the days of the breezeblock may finally be numbered, and not a moment too soon.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
