“Which house is that?” I asked cautiously, not being aware that he owned one of any particular architectural merit.He pointed vaguely in the direction of the mosque. “It's old,” he said hopefully. “A cave house.”
“I doubt if the EU can help. They don't usually give money to individuals,” I said. “And anyway, anything to do with the EU takes forever to sort out.”
That appeared to be that. I paid for my paper and left.
Not long afterwards, a rumor started to circulate in the village. The EU had apparently given $2.5 million to our Old Göreme Restoration Fund, in spite of which supposed beneficence our chairman had only managed to repair a handful of walls. Putting to one side the pertinent fact that the EU is the organization that gave the world the euro and is not therefore likely to be settling its bills in dollars, it wasn't hard to deconstruct the process by which such a fable could have acquired legs. The $2.5 million was, after all, a sum comparable to one a company had recently paid for one of Göreme's hotels. And certainly some money had become available, and had been used to restore some of the old walls.
But still I didn't put two and two together. Those of us on the charity's steering committee were indignant that people should be spreading such falsehoods, but still it seemed like so much hot air really, the sort of silliness that you learn to live with in a small and jealous community.
Then: “There's another rumor going around,” I was told. “Apparently the charity is working with the EU and is going to get money to restore all the old houses.”
It was the last and most telling piece in the jigsaw, because there is certainly someone in the village who is always discussing grandiose but purely personal plans for turning the old part into an open-air museum. The end result was a witch's brew of truth, half-truth and downright fantasy. But at last I understood why the newsagent had asked me that question. What I had taken as casual chit-chat suddenly became altogether more pointed. He was asking me not because I was a European and so must know how the EU works, but because I was a member of the committee that had supposedly acquired all this money and power. Would I, in other words, give him money to restore his house?
I suppose we should be laughing, really. Here we have a very small charity, the beneficiary so far of two donations of around 18,000 euros from the Australian tour company Intrepid Travel, and another of around 6,000 euros from an Australian publisher, to which have been added a few small personal donations and the minimal takings from our Open Houses event. This money has been ploughed back into repairing crumbling walls and refacing breezeblock in natural stone. Sure, we'd love the EU to fund us, if only someone could tell us how to apply.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
