There are the misunderstandings that fester. All too often the end result is bitterness and an unfortunate readiness to grab at gross generalizations to explain what has gone wrong. Of course if you’ve just lost everything you owned here it’s easy to forget the dodgy used-car salesmen, the cowboy builders, the shonky plumbers that preyed on the unwary back in England, and to start mouthing off about “the Turks” and their failings. Just as tourists tend to cling to every instance of overcharging and gloss over the acts of kindness encountered along the way, so expats who’ve hit the buffers often forget the many ways in which Turkey is still an extraordinarily honest society, something which was brought home to me in the nicest possible way recently when I rounded a corner in Diyarbakır and found myself eyeballing some bright red material that I had been looking for for the best part of two years.Cappadocian cave-houses are labyrinthine affairs for which a GPS navigation system might come in handy, and mine is no exception. I long ago fixed up enough of the caves to live here perfectly comfortably, but that still left others which are only slowly being rendered habitable. One outstanding cave comes equipped with a vast alcove that was probably used originally for treading grapes to make wine and then more recently for treading grapes to make pekmez (molasses). This, I decided a couple of years ago, would look perfect if fitted out with the same floor cushions that are a regular decorative feature of Aleppo in Syria. Of course the sensible person would have decided this while in Aleppo, where they could have been picked up for peanuts in the bazaar. I, on the other hand, only thought of it once back at home in Göreme.
Since then I’ve scoured the markets in any number of Turco-Syrian border towns without managing to find the material. Since Diyarbakır is nowhere near the border I wasn’t even looking for it on the day that I finally found it which meant, of course, that I didn’t have enough money with me to pay for it. It was mid-afternoon, and thanks to daylight saving time, there were not enough hours of daylight left to get to the bank, return to the shop and still be back in my hotel before darkness fell.
“I could leave TL 45 as a deposit,” I said to the shopkeeper, a complete stranger.
“Olsun [all right],” he replied.
“Then I can put the rest in your bank account when I get to İstanbul, and maybe you can cargo the material to Göreme for me?”
“Olsun.”
Nothing could have been simpler. I went to the Halkbank. I paid the outstanding sum. I phoned the shopkeeper to alert him to its arrival, and a few days later a friend emailed to confirm that the material had arrived. Perhaps such a cash transaction between strangers would be possible in the UK, too, but somehow I have my doubts.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
