Afterwards I found myself wishing that I could stand outside with a clipboard and ask each visitor as they emerged what exactly they had seen and what exactly they thought they had got out of their visit.I had similar thoughts earlier this year when İstanbul’s Sultanahmet Square was so full of tourists that it was almost impossible to cross it. I can see it coming, I thought, a bloody outburst of tourism rage as local people tire of having to divert around the square just to go about their business. Now it’s Göreme’s turn as our streets fill up with tourists and their cars and we find ourselves queuing interminably at the bank and post office.
Then this week the British Guardian newspaper ran an editorial entitled “Unthinkable? Testing tourists?” in which it suggested that would-be visitors should be made to fill out a questionnaire about what they wanted to see, what they knew about it, and why they wanted to see it. “One question could be: Where are you?” it said, going on to suggest that even this might stump many visitors who could then be put straight on a bus back to the airport.
Of course the article was tongue-in-cheek, but several times this year independent visitors have been heard to say that they decided not to bother visiting the Open Air Museum when they counted the coaches in the car park. I’ve also heard that the queues to get into the deepest of the underground cities at Derinkuyu are becoming equally off-putting.
The problem, as ever, lies in numbers. For many tour operators the most cost-effective way to run their businesses is to lump together as many people as possible at one time and then move them around en masse. The maths are the same, regardless of whether we’re talking about a cruise ship descending on St. Petersburg or İstanbul, or coach parties descending on Göreme. But the reality is that most historic attractions were not built to accommodate hundreds of visitors at once. Topkapı Palace may be able to absorb them (although what pleasure is to be got from viewing the Topkapı Dagger from beneath someone’s sweaty armpit is unclear), but the churches in the Göreme Open Air Museum are tiny, and it’s difficult to appreciate them when squashed up as in an old-fashioned dolmuş with 50 other people at once. In such conditions it’s hard to believe anyone emerges more enlightened about Byzantine art than when they went in. The worst of it is that people who really do know what they’ve come to see are completely put off by the crowds.
Of course all this whinging is pretty rich coming from someone who’s spent her life promoting tourism. In any case, we love our visitors here in Göreme -- at least most of the time.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
