Then I came huffing and puffing up the stairs, red in the face and breathless. “Hello,” I said, then without much more of a preamble, “If something happened to me, would you make sure I was buried?”Ali looked a little startled, as well he might have done, because of course had I been a Turk this suggestion would have been preceded by a good half-hour of pleasantries and ground-preparing. But he's a good sport and used to the crazy ways of foreigners, so he simply replied in the affirmative, and off I went again, satisfied. But my abrupt approach had taken some of the shine off his afternoon. “Later, I wondered if I should phone you. I wondered if there was something you weren't telling me,” he admitted.
As it happens, Ali and I have form when it comes to deciding how to dispose of my earthly remains. During the renovation of my house, the entire courtyard had to be repaved, after which two raised flowerbeds were created in the corner. Once the stones were in place I eyed them suspiciously. “They look a bit like old Roman tombs,” I said to Ali.
“Yes,” he said. “We'll bury you in your garden when you die.”
“But they're not long enough to lay me out!”
“That's all right. We can break your bones and bury you sitting upright.”
Hmm. But there's a serious issue behind all this jollity because quite a few of us Cappadocian immigrants have reached, shall we say, the midpoint in our lives, so it makes sense to start thinking about what we want to happen to us when we go. So far only one member of the foreign community has actually died in Göreme, and she was buried right beside the main cemetery in an area informally designated for non-Muslims. She was taken there in an old-fashioned wooden horse-cart bedecked with flowers, which was surely the nicest thing that could have happened.
Once or twice we have raised the subject tentatively amongst ourselves. A big problem is that we mainly come from countries where cremation is the norm. Of course there are no facilities for any such thing here, but burial used to be the norm in our societies too, so I was a bit surprised to hear people expressing a fear that they might be buried alive. For that reason alone, they insisted, they would prefer to have their remains repatriated to their countries of birth, no matter what the cost and inconvenience to relatives.
For my neighbors, of course, the very idea of cremation is an abomination. I've never forgotten the look of shock on their faces over one bayram (holiday) when I admitted that we had had my father cremated. “And the queen?” someone asked, which threw me for a bit -- the queen being still alive and kicking -- until I finally realized that they actually meant Princess Diana. Yes, she too had been cremated, I had to confess, which led to a right royal outburst of tut-tutting and exclamations of “ne yazık” (what a pity).
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
