It was a good question and one I had wondered about before deciding to settle in Göreme. The answer, rather surprisingly, turned out to be that from day to day tourism intrudes on our lives much less than you might expect. Of course, shops and restaurants can get away with charging higher prices, and from April through to October it can be hard to have an unbroken conversation with friends who work in tourism. However, once you settle in a tourist area, the visitors tend to retreat to the wings while fellow residents move center stage. Of course, many tourists become firm friends. Others also leave a lasting impression, although not necessarily the one they intended.
Take, for example, the woman who arrived at the Kelebek Pension in the depths of winter and ordered half a dozen bottles of very pricy wine. She had come to write an article about Cappadocian vintages, so I introduced her to Ali and Beşir, who worked at the pension. At once she decided that we must all help with the tasting. Ali and Beşir were village boys with no great knowledge of fine wines; I boast a sense of smell so defective that I can pass a sewage plant without noticing. No matter -- within minutes she had us standing beside her while she angled a glass of wine to the light.
“Look at the legs on this,” she said, and “legs, legs” we duly chorused without the faintest idea what we were talking about.
Then there was the man who turned up at the Köse Pension on another winter’s day when the Scottish owner had prepared a Sunday lunch of roast beef with all the trimmings. Given that this was a rare treat for deepest Anatolia we assumed our fellow diners were enjoying it as much as us. However, no sooner had we downed our forks than one of them moaned: “I didn’t get as much roast beef as the others.”
Keen to placate him, his hostess replied that her waiters were always very careful to serve equal portions.
“I’m telling you, I didn’t get as much as the others,” he repeated. Then when she continued to look doubtful: “Do you want me to write to the guidebook?”
In September 1999 I had just returned from helping to deliver Göreme’s earthquake relief contribution to Adapazarı. By then it was clear that more than 20,000 people had died in the quake, which didn’t stop a tourist announcing that it hadn’t looked all that bad to him as he flew in from Italy.
“I think you’ll find that it was pretty bad,” I said carefully.
“The media always exaggerate,” he replied. “Anyway, it’s usually worse for those on the outside.”
He was a guest in the hotel, but it was only with the utmost effort that I was able to refrain from strangling him.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
