We discussed all the new hotels and pensions, and the Old Göreme Restoration Fund’s attempts to repair some of the crumbling walls. Then we moved on to the more contentious topic of the gradual loss of authentic village life. My friend agreed that there was something sad about the way in which the true Göremelis were moving out. Then he grinned at me.“But at least I don’t have to run the gauntlet of all those women who used to try and lure me into their houses with offers of gözleme and other local delicacies,” he said, and I vividly recalled one of my neighbors commenting on how scared some tourists had looked when confronted with an importunate Fatma trying to sell them one of her embroidered yemenis (headscarves).
“Mind you, we were pretty frightened of Fatma, too,” that neighbor had added ruefully.
Then my friend’s smile widened. “Imagine if it was the other way round, and I was visiting England,” he said. “Just imagine little old ladies popping their heads out of their Cotswold cottages and going: ‘Psst, do you want to come in for cucumber sandwiches? Real English food!’”
We had no sooner finished chuckling over this one than he pressed on in whimsical vein. “You know, soon you’ll be the only real Göremeli left up here. You’ll be able to open your house to the tourists, and offer to cook them gözleme or knit them a scarf. All very traditional, of course.”
Ha, ha, ha, very funny! We’ll pass over the fact that I can’t even make gözleme, let alone knit a scarf. Still, it did give me pause for thought. I’ve been here for more than 11 years now, more than twice the time required to qualify for citizenship and a fair time by anyone’s calculations. Yet I still see myself as an outsider, an interloper, an alien plonked down in the midst of the troglodyte landscape.
Would it feel different, I wonder, if my Turkish was flawless, or if I had children here? Would that give me a sense of rootedness and belonging? Somehow I doubt it. Feeling a perpetual outsider, however much one appears to fit in, is the inevitable lot of the expatriate. It’s a choice we make and one most of us manage to live with quite comfortably. The problems only really start to arise when children arrive. Should I ever feel really unhappy here, I will still have the option of returning to the UK. If I had children, however, they would have been born here with no semi-allegiance to another country, yet still they would be looked on as outsiders and asked at regular intervals where they came from. Their perfect Turkish would be commented on with admiration, but the existence of their English mother would still disqualify them from routine acceptance unless they were fortunate enough to inherit looks dark enough to allow them to be taken for a full-blooded Turk.
Regardless, perhaps I better had start learning to make gözleme, ready for the day when I really am the last Göremeli in the neighborhood.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
