At that time it still felt fairly rural, what with the cobblestones and the chickens running around everywhere. Indeed, one of the things I had to learn to beware of at an early stage was that farm animals could crop up in unexpected places. Before tossing my rubbish into the bin, for example, I soon learned to take a quick peek inside first, lest there should be an indignant squawk, followed by a rustling of feathers as the chickens that had been scavenging inside it scrambled rapidly out again.These days, though, I hardly ever see a chicken. It's the sort of absence that takes a while to impress itself upon you. One day, it seemed, I was happily identifying all the different types and colors of chicken owned by my neighbors and admiring in particular a glorious little cockerel I called Napoleon because his small size was in such striking contrast with his I'm-the-king-of-the-castle air of confidence; the next I looked round and there didn't seem to be any chickens any more. “Weasels,” the neighbors said, but I suspect that was only part of the story. After all, having chickens wandering about in the streets hardly fitted with Göreme's new, smarter image. Country was out, small town was in and the chickens just didn't fit any more. Ipso facto, they had to go, or at least they didn't have to be replaced as nature saw them off one by one.
“I was driving round with the [ex] mayor,” a friend reported recently. “We came to the top of the hill and the neighbors had spread their hay out on the ground to dry. Immediately he was tut-tutting about cleanliness. What we see as picturesque, he just saw as squalid.”
Sadly, rural is often thought of as backward here, while urban is all swish and new. That being the case, my neighbors are only too keen to be rid of all signs of country life preferring “cleanliness” and “modernity.” Cows, chickens, donkeys -- none of these really fit with the forward-looking, go-getting mentality of modern Göremelis, and it probably doesn't help that the television programs depicting rural life usually do so in contexts which suggest that it is somehow backward. Certainly, most of our young people seem to relate better to images of urban life and jobs that don't require them to get their hands dirty.
That's all very well and understandable. The trouble is, though, that quite a lot of the foreign visitors who come here do so assuming that they'll be visiting the countryside. It's true that they want hot showers daily and ready access to the Internet. On the other hand, they're quite happy to see animals wandering around in the streets and a bit of mud, and general country messiness doesn't go amiss, either.
Nowadays I usually put my rubbish in a bin with a heavy lid on it that only Super Chicken would be able to penetrate. It's much cleaner and tidier, I suppose, but gosh, do I miss those indignant squawks.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
