Last week after news reached us that three men had lost their lives in an Ürgüp landslide, there was little on the tea-drinking ladies’ lips except damp, cracks and afet evleri (disaster houses), because of course they knew that this was not the first time that locals had died in such incidents. Göreme itself seems to have got off quite lightly but there had been previous fatalities in Ürgüp. In fact it’s fear of such disasters that explains the pattern of settlement in modern Cappadocia. In the 1950s and ‘60s villagers in Uçhisar, Göreme and Çavuşin were moved out of their old cave houses and into new ones made of concrete. These houses -- the afet evleri -- line the main road from Nevşehir through to Avanos which is why it’s possible to drive along it and completely miss the old villages set some way to the rear.
According to reports, the locals initially loved their new homes. They were, after all, free of damp and the ever-present dusting of crumbled stone that blighted the caves. But as time went on they began to notice their failings. In the past whenever a new addition to a family came along, all dad had to do was hack an extra room out of the rock. Of course no such cost-free expansion was possible with concrete. What’s more cave-houses maintain a constant temperature which means that they are warmer than average in winter and cooler than average in summer. Concrete, on the other hand, is colder than average in winter and hotter than average in summer -- disastrous both for heating bills and comfort.
“Are you sure that your house is safe?” a visitor once asked me, and the simple answer is that, no, I don’t know that it is. Had there been a fairy chimney on my land I would have needed to have a geological survey carried out before work began on restoration, but I don’t have a fairy chimney and so I passed on the survey.
One morning I was perched on the edge of my bed in the wee small hours when I felt an almost imperceptible shiver, the sort of shiver I might once have put down to too much wine over dinner or a bout of queasiness but that I now recognize as the rippling after-effect of an earthquake. Because it happened so late, only night owls would have felt it and I had almost forgotten about it when I bumped into my friend Mehmet.
“Did you feel the quake last night?” he asked. “At first I thought I was having a heart attack. Then I remembered that my heart is on the left side!”
All I can say is that no new cracks appeared in my walls or ceilings that day. Chances are, then, that my house is safe. But would I put money on it? Probably not.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
