These days I’m a stranger to nightclubs, but back then I was younger and more fun-loving and had allowed myself to be distracted by a young carpet-seller with almond eyes and the cheekbones of a gazelle. He’d snared me with the offer of a glass of nomad tea and then reeled me in with talk of a Turkish Night. In those days the Harem was a romantic hangout with curtained cave cubbyholes surrounding a dance floor but eventually I retreated to sit on the bench outside in exasperation at a display of “belly-dancing” virtually indistinguishable from stripping. Now the rock rested precisely where I’d made my protest.It was International Women’s Day and Prime Minister Erdoğan was due to pass through on his way to inspect the new university at Mustafapaşa. Consequently the surrounding fields bristled with unlikely gun-toting soldiers checking for would-be assassins amid the vines. Even more curiously the viewpoints normally occupied by tourists and camels had reverted to the sort of lookouts they must have been in the seventh century when the first wave of Arabs invaded Cappadocia.
A great sense of anticipation hung over Ürgüp’s main square where people’s eyes flickered nervously from the site of the disaster to the point on the road where they expected the Başbakan to materialize. Twice the loudspeaker crackled into life to assure us that he would be with us in five minutes, but as the second five minutes stretched into 50 the crowd of excited onlookers started to thin out.
At last the prime minister’s battlebus appeared whereupon pandemonium broke out as security men and reporters jostled each other for prime positions. Erdoğan delivered a short speech and handed out books to schoolchildren. We international women could just about make him out through the windscreen but as soon as he stepped out of the bus he vanished behind a wall of men hefting outsize TV cameras.
Anyway, in less than 10 minutes it was all over and I was heading back to Göreme nursing the realization that in the UK Prime Ministers Callaghan, Thatcher, Major and Blair had come and gone (well, almost) without me glimpsing hide or hair of them. Yet here in Cappadocia I had seen Prime Ministers Yılmaz, Ecevit and Erdoğan. Why was that, I wondered? Did Turkish politicians put themselves about more, or was it just easier to get to see them in a smaller community? Did lack of more formal entertainment make me pursue options I would have cold-shouldered in England? Or could it possibly be that I really did feel more involved with my adopted country than with my country of birth?
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
