There had been a serious accident involving a fatality and many injuries. “I heard the ambulance sirens at 6:30 a.m.,” said a friend, “and prayed that it was just someone taken ill when I knew from the timing that it had to be the balloons.”The details of what exactly happened that morning remain somewhat hazy, especially as at the time of writing the pilot had yet to recover his memory. One balloon took off, it seems. A second drifted up just that fraction of a second too close to it. There was a snagging of basket and balloon. The rest? Just disaster for all concerned.
It's at times like this that living in a small community can be particularly traumatic. Since everyone knows everyone else, everybody must share to some extent in everybody else's pain. So it was that I found myself feeling sick for the family of the man who had lost his life and for the badly injured survivors whose flight of a lifetime had ended in the misery and confusion of a hospital bed in Kayseri. At the same time I ached for the poor pilot, a wonderful young man, not long married, who will have to live with what happened for the rest of his life. Layered on top of all that came anguish for his friend, also a pilot, who had had to watch helplessly from the ground while events unfolded in the sky above him. Last but not least my heart bled for the owners of the balloon company, a couple on the verge of retirement whose blemish-free 10-year career as pioneers in the business had come to such a distressing end.
So many tears were shed that day. So many voices shook as they exchanged scraps of information and struggled to understand how an activity that had always seems so soft and gentle, so innocent, could have turned into something suddenly so malignant. In deep shock, people focused on harrowing details it was hard to listen to. As I struggled to find words to comfort a friend who had been to visit the injured, I could feel my own legs trembling, my voice flailing about amid inadequate responses.
In the scale of world problems, “Accident above Cappadocia, one dead” is obviously very small fry indeed, but we are all of us human, and even the most worldly of us still find it easiest to empathize with those we know personally. Ironically, on the very day that İstanbul was celebrating the conquest of the city in 1453 with music and fireworks, Göreme was receiving one of the worst shocks of the last decade. Life will go on, as it always does, but from now on May 29 will always be a day tinged with sadness for us all.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
