I was sitting at the table with my friends Süha and Ali, and an Australian visitor. While Ali was telling our guest about the conquest of İstanbul in 1453, I let my mind wander. Good food, good company, a perfect setting. Life surely didn’t get much better than this.“Then Fatih Mehmet got into İstanbul with 70 sheeps,” floated through my reverie.
What a lovely, bucolic sort of invasion, I thought, conjuring up a momentary image of Mehmet the Conqueror striding into Constantinople at the head of a flock of sheep.
Then: 70 sheep?
“What do you mean 70 sheep, Ali? What were they for?” I broke in.
Ali turned toward me in bewilderment. Then at one and the same time we realized my error. Not sheeps, but ships! Of course -- Fatih Mehmet and the 70 ships.
It was a comic, inconsequential misunderstanding but, as anyone who lives here will know, a great deal can be lost in translation and sometimes the results are more disconcerting.
I had not been living in Göreme long when I was walking home at 1:00 a.m. and saw a cloud of smoke emerging from a supposedly unoccupied property. Since several villagers have died from smoke inhalation, I immediately called the friend I had been visiting. “Phone the Gendarmerie,” was her sleepy advice.
So I phoned the Gendarmerie, but in a panic without thinking through what I needed to say first. Things didn’t get off to a good start because I assumed I was talking to an officer in the kiosk outside Göreme post office when in fact I was talking to someone in Nevşehir who knew none of the local landmarks.
However, that might not have been such a problem but for the crucial fact that I didn’t know the Turkish word for smoke (duman). Flailing around, I improvised by saying (I thought) that I had seen a cloud of fire coming out of an empty house and was worried about the people inside it. The one thing I certainly said was that the house was up the hill past the Kelebek Pension.
In the morning enquiries revealed that the property was being squatted by two men with mental health problems, but they had since been seen and I had forgotten the whole episode until one evening when I was sitting at the Kelebek and overheard Ali say, “Then the gendarme came rushing up here because someone had phoned and said a man was pointing a gun at a tourist.”
The Turkish word for cloud is bulut, which, when spoken, sounds an awful lot like bullet. Was it possible that I had said “bulut” and the gendarme had heard “bullet”? It certainly seemed that way.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
