These days such precautions against burglary might be commonplace, but in 1987 they seemed way over the top for an ordinary suburban street. Then one day I commented to a neighbor about my dull front door, so unlike the pretty paneled models of adjacent houses. The neighbor raised an eyebrow. “Well, you do know what happened?” he asked, before proceeding to enlighten me. Turned out I’d bought my house from a convicted drug dealer. The police had smashed a hole in the original door in the course of arresting him and had simply boarded it up again afterwards. Unless you buy a newly built house, you will always be sharing your property with ghosts -- the ghosts of those who lived there before you and couldn’t help but leave traces of their passing. So it was when I moved into my first rented home in Göreme. There, when I opened a cupboard door set into the wall, I found a tiny piece of newspaper stuck to the shelf. The newspaper was in Arabic, which meant that it had to have been sitting there since before 1928 when Atatürk introduced the Latin alphabet. Across the room I glimpsed the shadowy figure of a pot-bellied pasha reclining on the sedir (bench seat). He was reading out tidbits from the paper while his wife pleaded with him to give it to her for her shelves…
When I bought my own house in Göreme, I was particularly keen to salvage every reminder of the people who had lived there before me. Perhaps the most precious finds came from under the rotten sitting-room floorboards where, to my great delight, I found not just the top of a loom but also small pieces of carpet pattern. Suddenly two young women materialized in the room. They were sitting at the loom, their eyes wandering from the patterns to their fingers and back again…
Almost equally precious was a little glass bottle that once contained “Çoban” (shepherd) cologne. I knew from an İstanbul exhibition that this was a brand of cologne especially favored by men in the early days of the republic. At once the frail figure of a man emerged from the shadows. He was holding a small packet, a gift for the friend he had come to visit…
Years ago my house belonged to an imam, who would have been expected to accommodate passing visitors in the days before the pension boom. What is now my bathroom used to be a stable with innumerable mangers for animals cut into the walls. Most are just the right height for hungry cows and sheep. One, however, is too lofty even for a horse. Then I hear the soft sound of footfalls. A stranger is riding up to the gate on a camel. The imam emerges to greet him. They tether the camel beside the cows, give it food to eat…
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
