A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the sun chewing the fat with a friend and doing not very much at all when suddenly we found ourselves staring open-mouthed at a rather unusual sight. A long line of shiny, big bikes -- not necessarily Harley-Davidsons, but something along those lines -- was processing through the village, their riders kitted out with helmets, but looking a good deal less menacing than the Hell's Angels types who might have been spotted on similar machines in the UK. But it wasn't so much the bikes that left us so astonished (after all, enough overlanders make their way through Göreme in the course of a year); rather it was the neat little flags fastened on them just by the number plates, which indicated that the riders came from Lebanon, not a country well known for sending tourists to Cappadocia.Shortly afterwards, an old lady on a donkey sauntered past, looking neither to left nor to right. “Did you know that there are only two people left using donkeys?” my friend asked, and, no, I didn't know that, and it came as quite a shock to be told. Of course, I knew that there weren't many people left with donkeys if only because I so rarely hear that familiar heehawing noise in the early hours of the morning nowadays. But just two left, when the village is still festooned with photographs taken in the early 1970s that show whole lines of women making their way out to the fields on their animals?
Just days earlier, I had been listening to my friend Ali run through a quick version of the village's recent history for a group of visitors. “In the 1960s,” he said, “many men went to Europe to find work. To Germany, Sweden and Holland. When they left they all said they were going to save up the money to buy a tractor and then come back again. But, of course, most of them didn't come back. There was one who did though. He saved up and bought a tractor, then drove it all the way back here. He had big trouble in İstanbul, trying to find a way to get it across the Bosporus, but he got here in the end. It took him two weeks. It was the first Massey Ferguson in the village.”
Probably no one thought anything of it at the time. One tractor -- what difference would it make? But now, of course, there are plenty of tractors in the village, and no one would make a big song and dance about the arrival of a new one. It's not just the tractors that have seen off the donkeys, of course. After all, most people have abandoned their old gardens because tourism has provided an easier way to earn money, and one which allows them to buy whatever fruit and vegetables they need rather than growing their own. Still, one can't help but think that what was one small step for that particular farmer was one giant leap for Göreme.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia
