I popped across the street to check and learned that two antikacıs (antique-sellers) had driven by with a suite of old lounge furniture for sale. “I told them you might be interested,” Fatih said. The antikacıs had headed on to üçhisar but would probably be back soon. “I’ll be in the cafe,” I said, and wandered back to my tea.Shortly afterwards the two men pulled up in a battered truck, the back of which was filled with a five-piece suite of the sort of heavy wooden-framed furniture that has come back into fashion with a vengeance as hoteliers countrywide realized that with a bit of imagination and flashy material they could be made to look rather wonderful. It wasn’t especially easy to see the chairs which were half-covered with a tarpaulin. Nor, if I’m honest, had I had any intention of buying any more of them, having already had one pair reupholstered just last winter. But the price was TL 350, a bargain by anyone’s reckoning.
Half an hour later and the truck was parking in front of my house. Unfortunately, although İstanbul apartment blocks may be designed with space to get furniture through the door, Göreme cave-houses certainly are not. “Do you think it will go through the gate?” I asked the antikacı doubtfully, indicating the small archway that led to the least furnished part of my home.
“Geçer [it’ll pass],” he growled just seconds before we discovered that the winter rain had caused the back door to swell and the lock to jam. For 15 minutes we rattled and pushed, he on one side of the door and me on the other, before finally the entire lock barrel slid out into my hands. The antikacı’s companion was a chain-smoker aged about 80. Together they tried to ease the sofa through the gate where, not altogether surprisingly, it stuck. That left the possibility of hauling it over the wall, but how one able-bodied, youngish antikacı, one feeble middle-aged woman and one very elderly man were to achieve this was not immediately obvious.
With calls for rope ringing in my ears, I peered out into the street and glimpsed someone I knew. Shortly afterwards a team of builders who’d worked on my house in the past were striding up the hill with big grins on their faces. “No problem, Pat,” they assured me before shinning up the wall and across the twig covering laid to protect the stones from the snow, and heaving the sofa over it.
The antikacıs dropped me back at the cafe where my tea had long since gone cold. Next week I’ll be staying home and brewing my own, anyway, rather than risk racking up an even bigger bill for carpets, furniture or heaven knows what else might happen to be passing by.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
