These days the offices are guarded by policemen nursing machine guns lest any yabancı (foreigner) driven mad by the bureaucracy should run amok in the parking lot. But actually, to be fair to them, things have got a great deal better since first I started coming here. Either that or I've got better at coping with them, of course.In the bad old days, I would arrive in the room to find a policeman sitting miserably behind a desk piled high with Iranian passports, there being a large center for processing Iranian refugees nearby. In those days, there were no computers and every piece of the never-ending paperwork had to be hammered out two-finger style while all the time the queue of fidgety hopefuls in the doorway grew longer. Now there are lovely new PCs with purpose-designed templates for the most popular documentation. This, however, didn't stop the new kid on the block instructing me to write my own dilekçe (petition).
“You've been here 10 years,” he said. “Surely you should be able to do that.”
He had a point, of course. After 10 years I certainly should be able to write something a bit more profound than “Dear neighbor, please can you feed the cats and use up anything in the fridge” in Turkish. But then there's Turkish and there's official Turkish, and I doubt I'll ever master the latter given that even the word for citizen is not the normal “vatandaş” but something altogether more obscure beginning with “u.”
The real problem was, though, that I'd come to get my ikamet a month early, which is not how things are supposed to be. We batted this unreasonable request of mine back and forth for a while until at last the game stopped being fun and I was handed a pro-forma dilekçe to which only my name and the date had to be added.
In the past this was but the first step in a bamboozling journey around the grim corridors and stairwells of Fortress Nevşehir, but thankfully the ergonomics folk have been at work refining the system, which means that it's no longer necessary to wait outside the office of the vali (governor) admiring its padded door until he finds a gap in his busy schedule long enough to scrawl his signature on my paperwork. Nor is it any longer necessary to descend into a basement where clerks would copy the details of one's petition into vast, Dickensian ledgers.
It would be great not to have to have to supply new photographs every year (what do they do with them all, I wonder), and it would be great if there was a template invoice for payment, but really it's all become a bit of a doddle. They don't even bother to say “come back next week” anymore. Now it's “come back tomorrow” which, let's be honest, is a bit of an anti-climax.
Pat Yale lives in restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
