Last week I was due to renew my residency permit and, what with the recent toing and froing on visa regulations and too much time spent listening to tales of bruising encounters with the Emniyet Müdürlüğü in İstanbul, the whole idea of doing this had started to fill me with dread. This is, perhaps, why I noticed an enormous rectangular block of salt sitting in a glass case in front of Nevşehir Valilik. It had come from a salt mine at Tuzköy near Nevşehir Airport, apparently, and weighed almost five tons. Was it there before? Really, I have no idea because last year I was probably feeling so much more chipper about the whole procedure that I waltzed straight up the steps to the entrance, looking neither to the right nor to the left of me.This time, though, the ghost of a previous occasion kept flickering in the back of my mind. I’d gone with an American friend to help him navigate his way through the maze of visa renewal. Most of the people who usually staffed the visa office were on holiday, leaving one lonesome woman behind a typewriter. She fingered my friend’s passport as gingerly as if she thought it might blow up in her face at any moment. After a few seconds’ scrutiny she handed it back again. “We don’t renew visas for Greeks,” she said.
“But I’m an American!” my friend squeaked.
She took it back again, gave it another cursory glance, then tapped out the necessary paperwork to kick-start the giant game of snakes and ladders that was at that time the way to get a visa extension. It had been August then. It was August now, and the heat does funny things to people.
So imagine my delight to find familiar faces, familiar smiles, even offers of tea as I handed over the little blue book that is all that stands between me and unhappy return to the UK. One of the police officers had his son beside him, this being school holidays, and soon I was giving an impromptu English lesson to the pair of them. It was relaxed, it was pleasant, but on the wall behind them I could see the reason writ large. Assuming those figures were up to date, there are just 155 foreign citizens with residency rights in the whole of Nevşehir province. In contrast, the poor old emniyet in İstanbul probably struggles to cope with a similar number in one day, making it rather harder to roll out the tea and sympathy.
Two days later I returned to collect my new booklet. “Come back from time to time and we can practice English,” the policeman said as he handed it over.
Residency doesn’t come cheap, especially if your blue book that holds the details is full and needs replacing. On the other hand when I think about it the last council tax bill I paid in Bristol amounted to around 1,000 pounds and that was 12 years ago. You could say that that had been a tax on my right to live in my own town, in which case residency suddenly doesn’t seem quite so expensive after all.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
