In a village like Göreme the changes may not be so dramatic, but still they are visible in the new traffic lights, the new bridges across the storm channels and the flashy new computer system installed in the post office. But of course just as people grouse about the changes in İstanbul, so they grouse about those in Göreme too. When we first heard that our overhead electricity cables were being taken down, we all gave three cheers -- only to find our cheers turning to groans when we realized that now every single doorway would have to have an ugly steel box beside it to facilitate meter-reading. Of course it’s great to have improved street lighting so that we don’t fall down potholes in the dark -- but did it really have to come in the form of soaring motorway-style lamp-posts that black out the stars? As for the dumbbell-shaped paving stones that have replaced the old cobbles… well, of course they’re easier to walk on and of course they keep the mud down, but really they are just so ugly…
The other day while I was drinking tea at a neighbor’s it also dawned on me what profound changes were taking place below the surface. The women were caught up in a heated argument and it was the exact same argument that I remembered from my own younger days. Some of them had grown-up children and wanted to go out to work. However other women were complaining about the risk of latchkey kids coming home to empty houses and getting into trouble. Voices were also raised against the general principle of women working outside the home, although these, I noted with interest, were relatively muted.
Of course I’d known at a subconscious level what was happening. Last year my favorite neighbor had begged me to help her find work. Her three sons were growing up, she said, and they pestered her endlessly for clothes, books and shoes. On a personal level she was going mad with boredom stuck at home all day, not to mention the excess weight she was accumulating from lack of exercise.
I duly approached a local hotelier on her behalf. “It’s so interesting, Pat,” he said. “A few years ago none of the husbands would have allowed their wives to go out to work. I had to go to Nevşehir to find cleaners.”
My neighbor comes from a particularly conservative family so for her to take a job outside the home was a very big step. That was 12 months ago, and this year her friends are falling over each other in the rush for work. In an astonishingly short space of time economic necessity seems to have transformed the completely unthinkable into the norm.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
