Interesting, I thought vaguely, as in the ways of things in Göreme that room might or might not belong to me. At one point someone had certainly been living there, but since I bought the adjoining property they’d moved out. That’s what I thought anyway.In winter there were far more pressing things to be worrying about (leaks, the cost of heating, etc.), so I must say I’d forgotten all about that light until one evening I overheard my neighbor mention that her husband and his friends had started using that room for smoking in. It’s no longer legal to smoke in the kahve (teashop), you see, which has made life difficult for an older generation of hopelessly hooked nicotine addicts for whom it was a home from home.
In London at the moment there’s a vogue for what have been dubbed pop-up restaurants, temporary eateries in private homes. Now, I suppose, we have the pop-up kahve, or to be more accurate, the pop-up smoking room.
When the ban on smoking in public places came into force last July, I was one of those who was jumping for joy at the prospect of being able to sit down in a restaurant without having to worry that other diners would light up. Even now I don’t suppose I would actually vote for the ban to be overturned, but the truth is that I am starting to have some reservations about it. In the city of London, workers are now trying to persuade smokers to carry portable ashtrays to alleviate the problem of all the cigarette stubs dropped around the entrances to buildings, and here it was soon apparent that the nuisance of smoke would continue, and that non-smokers would now have to stand well away from the perimeters of buildings if they wanted to avoid the fumes.
But what really bothers me is the more general problem of diminishing personal freedom. Sure, I like to be able to sit in a smoke-free environment, but is it just the thin edge of the wedge? Wherever I go lately (and I don’t just mean in Turkey), I sense a clamping down on freedom, a slow diminution of people’s rights to make choices about their own lives. Of course, it’s true that few non-smokers would want to hang out in the fume-filled kahve, and that the people who work there have a right to do so in a clean environment (always assuming that they don’t smoke themselves), but if that means that the teashop will no longer be able to earn enough to stay open in winter, isn’t there something rather sad about the loss of something once so central to village life? At one time, the ban was meant to encompass nargile cafes, too. So far I haven’t heard that any of them have closed, but if they did, it would be kissing good-bye to a cultural tradition that had recently received a new lease of life. The words baby and bathwater spring forcefully to mind.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
