At the top of a new flight of stone steps I found a group of neighbors clustered around a tractor from which they were offloading pumpkins. We exchanged the customary pleasantries. Then, “When are you going to start the building work on the other house?” one of them asked me. Some 18 months ago I finally caved into necessity and bought the house next door to my own, which had originally formed part of it. I did this not because I needed a single square meter of extra space -- I don’t! -- but because when the single house had been divided into two to provide homes for two sons in accordance with Turkish inheritance law the split had left an upstairs room belonging to one brother while the downstairs one belonged to the other. Ipso facto, had the other property been sold to anyone other than me I risked having someone living not just beside me but above me, too. Simply to clean the facade of their part of the property would have meant their having to erect the scaffolding on my land. All the ensuing dust and disruption would have fallen on my side of the partition wall.
Unfortunately, gone are the days when a cave-house could be restored for relative peanuts. One friend of mine has been struggling with building costs that have spiraled to four times the original estimate, a salutary warning of what could happen if I fool myself into thinking I can get the work done on the cheap. Since the next-door property has a fairy-chimney rock formation on it, I will need to pay a geologist to certify that there’s no risk of landslide as well as employing an architect to draw up the restoration plans. None of this is likely to come cheap.
Actually, I suspect my neighbor was enquiring not so much out of genuine interest as from fear that no sooner had this summer’s building work finally come to a halt allowing his family some much-needed peace and quiet than I would be wanting to start banging and hammering and drilling just meters away from it.
“Don’t worry, I haven’t got any money. I won’t be doing anything for ages yet,” I replied. Unless a miracle happens and one of the tickets in the Milli Piyango (national lottery) that I never buy magically comes up trumps, I mentally appended.
I think I detected a lightening in my neighbor’s expression, a sigh of relief carefully bitten back as he hefted a few more pumpkins. Still, it’s a problem that’s going to have to be addressed one of these days. No building that is left unlived in fares well, and cave-houses quickly start to crumble back into the landscape. In the ideal world I’d be able to do the work piecemeal as and when I managed to find some cash. Unfortunately that’s not how the system works. I’ll need a master plan for the whole house before I can even approach the authorities for permission to start building. I suppose that’s something to be thinking about over the long, cold months ahead of us.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
