It was 1999. I was new to Göreme, and those were the days before satellite television, let alone 3G telephones with built-in video facilities. There were the bars and discos in the village, of course, but not a great deal else in the way of organized entertainment, so like everyone I tended to pounce on anything that came along as if it were an invitation to a Sezen Aksu concert.Bing, bang, bong, and the belediye (municipality) sound system jolted into action. Then-Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz and then-President Süleyman Demirel were arriving to open the brand-new airport in Nevşehir (well, Gülşehir, actually), and a bus was being laid on to ferry us all to the event.
In we climbed with all the enthusiasm of teenagers on their way to see Galatasaray play Fenerbahçe. The road to Gülşehir was lined with gun-toting security guards, not to mention an unaccountably large number of fire tenders. Their function, we discovered on arrival, was not so much to extinguish any blazes that the airport’s own tenders couldn’t cope with, but to serve as handy frames from which to hang all sorts of celebratory bunting. Indeed, festooning the fire tenders with bunting proved so exciting a business that some of us almost missed the start of the speeches way away at the opposite end of the runway.
Prime Minister Yılmaz and President Demirel had a lot of good things to say about the fortune that would accrue to Cappadocia as a result of the new airport, and absolutely nothing at all to say about the swirling cloud of corruption allegations surrounding them. We listened politely, clapped in all the right places, then found ourselves caught up in an over-enthusiastic mini-scrum as they rushed away to open a new road elsewhere. I remember shaking hands rather sheepishly with neighbors as we picked up lost shoes left behind on the red carpet in the melee. Then we bused back to the village, rather pleased with ourselves that we’d had such a fun day out.
Of course, the next thing we knew the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist leader Abdullah Öcalan was arrested, his followers issued threats against visitors and the local tourist industry imploded. Shortly afterwards the new airport was mothballed. It didn’t re-emerge from the wardrobe again until 2006, when suddenly the economy was on the up and there were enough potential passengers to keep it busy.
Actually, flying out of Nevşehir turned out to be a surprisingly matey business. The girl at the check-in desk? Well, didn’t she used to work at the Alaturca restaurant? Weren’t those young men over there once employees at the Kelebek Hotel? And, goodness me, wasn’t that our new mayor standing right in front of me in the queue to board? That same old business of living in a small community, you see. Its coziness never ceases to amaze me.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
