I stumbled upon this shop in 2003, attracted by a brass mangal (brazier) for sale on the pavement outside. The owner looked startled to have landed a yabancı customer but was happy to open his doors outside hours so I could pick it up at a time of my convenience. Since then I doubt he’s ever run a duster over his shelves, despite my many hints.The shop has no name, nor is the owner guaranteed to be found on the premises although his door is usually open. None of this would have been so surprising in 2003. However in 2007 it seems astonishing, because the market for other people’s cast-off fixtures and fittings has taken off in a big way as hotels and restaurants snap them up to decorate their walls.
In Göreme we have a much snazzier antique shop with prices which are inevitably skewed to the tourist market. Additionally we have a casual retailer of discarded pots and pans who sets up stall outside the mosque and does his best to cajole me into parting with my money. His is a hit-or-miss collection of oddments, only one step up from the sort of things loaded onto the trucks of the rag-and-bone men who still tour the village, collecting our burnt-out stove buckets. Most of what they collect is rubbish in anyone’s book, but still it’s worth taking a quick look. Only last week a friend found a magnificent bell complete with wall panel, while I, on one occasion, picked up an old wooden sandık (dowry box) and a metal bed-frame. Delivering them to me later my friend Ali joked: “Is there something you’re not telling us, Pat?”
A few years ago an elderly couple from the Black Sea passed through the village with a huge collection of old artifacts. It would have been hard to imagine a sadder pair. He had had his voice box removed after throat cancer but lacked the gadget that makes it possible to amplify the remaining sound. The only person who could understand him was his wife -- and she had lost both her legs to diabetes. Naturally we were all very keen to buy their stock.
That evening a van pulled up outside my house and all sorts of things were emptied onto the doorstep -- old spinning wheels, old soup cauldrons, assorted pots, two wooden cradles, even a düven, a curious piece of wood studded with flints that used to be used to thresh wheat. As they were offloaded, my neighbors cast a withering glance over my purchases.
“Junk!” they unanimously concluded.
“Ah, but she’s a foreigner,” they added, before heading for home and their smart new 84-piece dinner services.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia
