Noticing that cleaning work had restarted on the mosque opposite my house, I popped my head in and discovered an usta (master builder) who once worked on my house busily scraping whitewash off the walls. In so doing he had already uncovered the word “Allah” in black lettering above the door, together with the date that the mosque was built. “1303,” it read in Arabic, which translates into 1883 according to the Gregorian calendar. Since this is painstaking work -- rather like stripping the paint off the walls of Victorian churches in England to reveal the medieval frescoes underneath -- I was relieved that the task had fallen to Bekir Usta.I first met Bekir after buying a marble fountain to go in my courtyard. For four years I had trailed the measurements around local junkyards in search of something suitable, but nothing had materialized until at last I found, in İstanbul’s Kapalı Çarşı (Grand Bazaar), an appropriate fountain -- or at least an old marble hamam basin and a wall panel that, put together, would form a fountain.
UPS agreed to cargo it to Göreme. However, used to delivering slender envelopes weighing grams rather than hefty crates weighing tons, the man from UPS was less than happy with me.
“A stone,” he sneered as he dropped the crate on the ground. Neither he nor I had a crowbar with which to open it.
“I’ll write here that I couldn’t see if it was okay,” I said casually, a statement that only added insult to injury.
“Of course it’s okay! We’re UPS!” the delivery man shouted before departing in a huff.
In his place I needed someone more sympathetic to install the fountain. Enter Bekir Usta, a middle-aged builder from the tiny village of Kavak who spoke in an accent almost as craggy as his face. Bekir Usta arrived to begin the work, then left again leaving the courtyard strewn with rubble and the fountain half in and half out of the wall. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he assured me, but of course 10 days had passed before I roped in an intermediary to plead with him.
The next day my gate swung open again and in marched 10 men. There was work to keep one of them occupied for perhaps half an hour, so while Bekir Usta busied himself about the task his companions leaned over the terrace, draped themselves up and down the stairs, and lounged about in the courtyard chairs.
“Ten of you!” I kept repeating. “Ten days I’ve waited and now there are 10 of you!”
Bekir Usta simply laughed off my indignation. He had that fountain in the wall (undamaged, just as the man from UPS had said it would be) in less than 15 minutes. We’ve been friends ever since.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
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