Then last week saw another first for the village, this time the arrival of a grand piano to point up just how far we’d come along the path from agrarian make-do-and-mend to full-on upscale tourism.Plink, plink, plonk, plonk. All day I’d been working hard at home, trying to meet a deadline with this unfamiliar sound as a backdrop. Then slowly it dawned on me that what I was hearing was the unlikely sound of a piano being tuned. Right next door to my house, you see, a new cultural center has just opened its doors. It started off with a small photographic exhibition before moving full steam into position as a venue for our burgeoning Cappadocia Music Festival. Great for me if not, perhaps, for some of the villagers whose closest encounter with Western high culture in the form of classical music hitherto had been the two bars of tinny Für Elise that routinely announce time to change classes in the village school (and which, sadly, echo all the way up the hill to inflict themselves on my ears too).
The cultural center has been a long time in the making. When I first came to live here there were a few broken-down arches and derelict rooms perched on a bluff above the mahalle (neighborhood) mill. “My grandfather’s house,” Ali said wistfully. “Perhaps you’d like to buy it?”
That was in the days when my house purchase looked likely to fall through and I was desperately casting about for something to fall back on. “But I want to restore something,” I said dismissively. “There’s nothing there to restore. It’s all fallen down.”
Not long afterwards I bumped into Ali at the Nevşehir Valilik where he’d gone to sort out the paperwork for the property. I’d gone there for a visa extension. “They told me to come back tomorrow,” I said.
“They told me to come back next week,” he retorted.
Time passed. There were legal issues over the ownership of the property which had been left, according to Turkish law, to Ali and all his siblings. Then three years ago work finally began on the site. At once it threw up surprises, not least what appeared to have been a private mescid with carved stone cypresses on either side of the date in Arabic numerals. I watched in anxiety as they were exposed to the air, then breathed a sigh of relief when they vanished safely inside a newly built room again.
Ali had talked about opening a museum although, unfortunately, most of Göreme’s most interesting heirlooms had long since been dispersed. Instead a lovely restaurant opened on the site. But then came the exhibition and now the concert. That evening around 150 of us gathered to listen to Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven with only the slightest of hiccoughs when the call to prayer rang out mid-recital. The musicians played on regardless.
“I wonder what your grandfather would have thought?” I said to Ali.
“Valla, I wonder,” he said with a smile of complete contentment on his face.
*Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
