This is the time of year when my daily stroll to the post office starts to take twice as long as neighbors migrate to their doorsteps with their knitting and the walk is broken up by short stops to exchange pleasantries. Most of this is routine stuff -- enquiries into each other’s health, exclamations of alarm at how much cat hair is adhering to my clothes, the occasional mention of a birth, death or marriage -- but every now and then something crops up to remind me just how much I still have to learn about village life.This week an old lady was sitting outside with a piece of denim stretched across her lap. On it lay a length of rope which she was busily shredding into short threads.
“What’s that for?” I asked nosily and she started to explain in thickly-accented Macanca (the old Göreme dialect). It was medicine, she seemed to be saying. It helped with aches and pains.
Medicine from rope? Assuming I’d misunderstood something, I described the scene to a friend. “It’s for şişe çekme,” he explained. “She sets fire to a piece of thread and puts it inside a tea glass, then turns it upside down over the pain.” Ah yes, cupping, I thought. We used to do that in the UK too although not, I would have thought, since the 1800s.
Of course Göreme has an excellent eczane (drugstore) where we can buy all the latest pharmaceuticals, but that doesn’t stop the old folk remedies retaining their fans. One evening I was sitting at a neighbor’s when the conversation drifted to ailments. Suddenly Fatma spun round. “You have a black cat, don’t you, Pat?” she demanded.
“Well, yeees,” I replied, somewhat apprehensively.
“Can I have a piece of its fur?”
We retreated to my house where I held the unhappy cat while Fatma chopped out a handful of hair.
“What do you want that for?” I ventured to ask.
“Women’s problems!” she replied in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of way. A friend in Nevşehir, apparently.
On another occasion I came across a neighbor crying on her doorstep. Her stomach was in agony, she groaned, so I made haste to summon her son back from work to run her to hospital. There they diagnosed an overdose of nohut (chickpeas) and turşu (pickles). Wind, basically! But my friend’s mother was dismissive of such banality. The next day I learned the favored diagnosis.
“My navel had moved,” she assured me. “But it’s all right now. I’ve had it pushed back again.”
That evening I was crying with laughter as I repeated the story to Fatma, but, “Oh yes, Pat. We have someone in our mahalle who can do that too,” she assured me, and from the look on her face I gathered that this was no laughing matter after all.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
