One of the drawbacks to living in a cave-house, you see, is that normal doorbells are rarely suitable, their chimes unable to penetrate through all the layers of rock. Consequently I started out my life in this house with two doorbells: the first a conventional one that would ring in the kitchen and be audible in the bedroom above, the other a far more complicated piece of apparatus that could be heard in the sitting room upstairs. Neither bell could be heard in the bathroom or the further reaches of the house, and the more complicated bell soon fell victim to wind and rain anyway. Of course that doesn’t explain why I’ve never gotten around to replacing the battery in the conventional model…Anyway, I unbarred the gate to find four men standing outside. In the way of modern Turkey they all had neat little nametags hanging down their shirtfronts, and they carried an impressive array of equipment. They’d come to measure the house for a new imar planı, they told me.
The imar planı is a map of the buildings in the village, and Göreme’s is a source of contention since our failure to have it registered has been cited as the reason why foreigners have not been able to buy houses here since the last new property law came into operation. So if we gain a new imar planı, we should fall back into line with the rest of the country some time in the near future. That’s the theory anyway.
Three of the men strode into the courtyard with their cameras and drawing board; the fourth lurk+ed outside periodically yelling “devam et” (go on) to his colleagues, who were a pretty gung-ho bunch of surveyors.
“It will be difficult doing next door,” I started to explain. “It’s mostly fallen down,” but already the three of them were scrambling over the wall without so much as asking if there was a gate between the two properties. The next thing I knew a shadow that looked remarkably like a periscope in a James Bond movie was flickering across the surface of the fairy chimney next door, causing the pair of black redstarts who live there to take off at a rate of knots while the cats looked on in awe from the safe distance of the adjacent wall.
I peered over the shoulder of the man with the actual plan, and I must say it didn’t look too different from the existing one I’d seen in the belediye (municipality) building. But then when I think about it there’s been so much building here over the last five years. Of course the existing plan must be out of date, and the new one will show all the new hotels and houses, not to mention the smart new staircases near my home.
I’m not holding out much hope for renewed sales of property to foreigners though. Somehow I bet there’ll turn out to be another snag.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
