The experience was so enjoyable that I was soon signing up for another chance to see these architectural glories, this time in nearby Savannah, which is famous for its series of beautiful town squares romantically festooned with dripping Spanish moss. I was far from the only person with the idea and we house-visitors were soon exchanging tips with fellow architecture-lovers met in the Charleston queues.Thus was born the seed of an idea: if people would pay to see inside private homes in Charleston and Savannah, why wouldn’t they pay to do the same in Göreme? After all the cave houses are the most interesting aspect of village life, and yet most people only get to see inside them if they know someone local.
Two years after the visit to Charleston, I attended the hugely popular Art Deco Festival in Napier, New Zealand. At the top of my list of must-dos for the visit was a “Beguiling Bungalows” tour of privately-owned Art Deco houses. By the end of the morning the seed had taken root and I was convinced that this was an idea that could be transplanted to Cappadocia.
The idea took some time to germinate properly, but this weekend the first “Captivating Caves” event finally took place in Göreme. Over the course of two days people from as far afield as Melbourne and Hawaii visited everything from a simple, barely modernized cave-home to the house of a Göremeli who spent much of his life in Holland before deciding to use the monetary compensation for an industrial injury to complete the beautiful and sensitive restoration of his grandfather’s old house.
Of course the pièce de résistance was the Mehmet Paşa Konağı, the magnificent frescoed home of a 19th-century governor of Cappadocia -- a building which has wow-factor in spades. After years in which no outsiders had been able to see inside this neglected gem, several visitors immediately pronounced it the highlight of their trip to Göreme.
In Britain the “Open Garden” schemes regularly raise money to pay for cancer nurses. Here the proceeds of our event will go to the Old Göreme Restoration Fund in an attempt to make good on some of the damage done to the environment over the years. To the best of my knowledge these tours were a first not just for Göreme but for Turkey too. This time around, we managed to entice only 38 visitors into our homes, but the tours will run again in September. From little acorns great oak trees grow, or so we Britons like to say. With luck that will prove to be the case with our cave-house tours too.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
