Then I glance out of the window at the teahouse next door, and there I see two old men who perfectly personify the old village. Of course they’re not wearing fezes (no one wears fezes any more except tourists and people working in tourism). However, they are wearing the sort of woolly bobble hats that are shaped liked fezes and that no one under about 60 would be seen dead in. They also sport beards. Not Taliban-style, two-fist-length bushy beards, but sharp, pointy ones that jut out from their chins. When I think about it, I can barely think of any men under 30 who wear beards here, and those who do tend to be vaguely hippyish, their beards symbolic of an alternative take on life rather than the sort that would have been de rigueur for their grandfathers’ generation. When I first came to Göreme and started doing the rounds of the women’s tea parties, I remember meeting quite a lot of women who were the female equivalents of those old men. Even 10 years ago, they seemed to belong to another world, a slower world in which women had barely stirred from their mahalles (neighborhoods) for fear of provoking malicious gossip. There was about them an unworldliness that seemed extraordinary to someone like myself who had roamed the globe freely, and I remember thinking even then that they represented something that was gone forever since even the poorest of village girls now went to school and had access to television and images of the outside world.For a while, unlike their menfolk, even the younger women still dressed the part of the old Göreme. They didn’t plait their hair into tiny braids any more, but they did stick with the şalvar (baggy pants) and knitted waistcoats and they did still cover their heads with gauzy traditional scarves, called yemenis. But recently even that has started to change. Some of the younger women wear the same immaculately Westernized clothing as their male partners, but those who prefer an Islamic look tend to go for the style that is most in favor in İstanbul, with a close-fitting “bone” (skullcap) beneath a satin scarf. It’s as hard now to conjure up an image of a woman in her 20s who wears the traditional yemeni as it is to think of a man in his 20s who wears a bobble hat.
‘Twas ever thus, of course. Change comes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, when I look at the mobile-phone-loving Indian couple, and then at a pair of passing Göremelis, it’s interesting to reflect that at one time they would both have been dressed completely differently. Now, for the most part, there’s nothing to distinguish them, bar their skin color. Welcome to the new world of global conformity.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
