A few winters ago though a British writer friend emailed a query. “This is what I was going to write about Göreme,” he said. “But X says it’s wrong. What do you think?”I stared at the sentence on the screen and then glanced out of the window. “Göreme is a bustling small town of some 6,000 people,” he had written. Outside on the street nothing stirred and not a sound ruffled the silence. Six thousand people? Well, downsize by about two-thirds, and that might be about the sum of us.
A few months earlier I’d been negotiating with the Lonely Planet guidebook company over the start date for the new edition of their Turkey book. The original instructions said February. But: “I don’t think February is very realistic,” I wrote back. “Half the country will be under snow, and in the tourist areas, all the hotels will be closed.”
Over in the Australian publishing house they saw things differently (not surprisingly given that they were basking in glorious sunshine). “The marketing department thinks February is best for getting the book to the readers on time,” came the reply.
Some battles are not even worth engaging, but others just have to be taken on. “Well, I’ll be all right because I’m doing İstanbul and that has tourists all year round. But A will probably end up stuck in snowdrifts out by Van, and B will have trouble finding anywhere to stay in Marmaris...” I persisted.
In the end, sense was seen, and the start date was pushed back by a couple of months, but I have to admit that there was a treacherous little voice inside my head that was daring me to go for it. Imagine what an extraordinary book you could come up with if you just wrote what you really saw in February, it whispered.
Something like this perhaps...
“Now here’s a mystery. People always say how lively Göreme is. How many bars and discos and restaurants it has. Backpacker Central, they’ve called it, but the odd thing is that we found virtually everything closed. It’s true that there are lots of hotels in all price brackets, but most of them seem to be struggling to attract any customers. Most seemed unenthusiastic about turning on the heating. As for company, forget it -- chances are you’ll have the place to yourself.”
Given all this, I’m offering up a prayer of gratitude to Nazar Boncuk, the cute little gözleme and börek shop in the village center that keeps its doors open come snow and high water. In the past, we winter-hardened souls used to huddle together for warmth in the small arched room that housed it, but this year the wooden kiosk across the street that is such a joy in summer has been enclosed with nylon sheeting, so now we can huddle around a wood-and-coal-burning stove and keep warm while pretending we’re actually outdoors. What’s more, there’s linden tea on the house. And March is only weeks away anyway.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
