This fact was brought home to me most forcefully last year when one of the authors of the “Little Hotel Book,” which describes Turkey’s finest places to stay, declared the guide closed to new Cappadocian properties. “If something goes in, something else will have to come out,” he told me sternly.Ironically when I first came to Göreme, back in 1974, there were only three very basic pensions in the village, and I put up at the Mocamp in Nevşehir. Now, however, Göreme alone has more than 60 pensions and hotels, and that’s before we take into account all those in Ürgüp, Uçhisar, Avanos, Ortahisar and Mustafapaşa.
The years have seen hotel fashions come and go. The first local places to stay were little more than jazzed-up family homes, most of them not even in caves. Then gradually the cannier villagers cottoned on to the fact that tourists would love to be able to try out the troglodytic lifestyle, so slowly a few redundant caves were transformed into pensions. At first they were still very basic. Then the Esbelli Evi opened in Ürgüp, and for the first time people saw that it was also possible to turn caves into boutique hotels. The idea took a few years to catch on but now the floodgates are well and truly open, and hoteliers are struggling to outbid each other in the luxury stakes with private hamams, double jacuzzis and romantic private restaurants adorning the newer properties.
Until last year most hotels still favored a style of ethnographic chic that made decorative use of local artifacts such as old pots, horse carts and retired farm implements. Then this week I visited the Karlık Evi in Uçhisar and realized that rusticity had become a tad passé as urban hip took a grip on Cappadocia. Purple floor cushions, cowhide chair coverings, up-to-the-minute free-standing hand-basins have all made it here via (one assumes) the pages of the fashion magazines. Suddenly the “in” thing is circular beds, even circular beds on raised stone platforms and ringed with candles -- all impeccably New Age.
But what struck me most of all was the rehabilitation of the old-fashioned Turkish three-piece suite. You know the one, with its carved wooden frames and sturdy beige upholstery? I used to loathe these things, and a friend in İstanbul recently paid to have one removed from his apartment. Suddenly, however, they are absolutely a la mode. All you have to do it seems is reupholster them in jauntier fabric and, bingo, you have seating suitable for the hippest of cave hotels.
Now all I have to do is find someone with a suite they’d like to sell to me…
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
