In an instant I was cast straight back to 2002, to the months just after I’d moved into my newly restored home when one of the first things that happened as winter approached was that the newly installed pipes froze and burst, with consequent flooding of my newly restored dining room. Not surprisingly given the porous nature of the Göreme landscape, there was flooding too of my new neighbor’s not so newly restored wheat store perilously positioned in the cave beneath my dining room.Not wanting to get off on the wrong foot with anyone, I waited just long enough for the plumber to pump out the water and fix the burst pipe before rushing round with an offer of financial compensation. Smiles all round, and that appeared to be that, so I returned to the house to stare sadly at my erstwhile flat wooden floorboards which now looked more like the waves of a storm-lashed sea.
No sooner had darkness fallen than there came a ring on the doorbell, and a strange man presented himself at the gate and proceeded to behave in a way that was even stranger. That is to say that he -- a man completely unknown to me -- pushed straight past me into the courtyard and closed the gate behind him. In those days my Turkish was far from robust, but it was still good enough to get his general drift, which came down to an assertion that he owned the apple storage depot beneath my house; that the water had flowed into it and damaged his apples; and that he wanted -- surprise! surprise! -- financial compensation.
Irritation at his casual trampling over the unspoken rules that governed mahalle (neighborhood) life and should have kept him away from me gave me the courage to stand up to him. All the time that the building work had been in progress, I pointed out, there had been water inside that cave. What was more, I had been asked to leave gaps in the flagstones to allow air to circulate round the apples to which end I had installed an old millstone with a hole in the middle of it in the courtyard. Clearly the same hole that let air circulate could also let water in. The man argued with me, but I was having none of it. We exchanged insults before he finally conceded defeat, leaving me to confirm with the authorities that the cave below the courtyard did indeed belong to me.
Since then to the best of my knowledge, no one had ventured near it. Of course my immediate instinct on remembering that alarming encounter in the dark was to tell the two women to go away. On reflection, though, I decided that live and let live would be a better approach. “Buyurun!” said the women, offering apples as a gesture of goodwill. Let’s just hope I make it through this winter without any more burst pipes.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
