The census-takers passed through Göreme last December while I was in İstanbul, and only slowly did the message filter through to me that it was important to get myself registered, not least because Göreme is a small place whose entitlement to call itself a kasaba (small town) rests on a knife edge. Should there turn out to be fewer than 2,000 of us living here, theoretically we could lose our belediye (municipality), and all the status and money that goes with it.You would think, wouldn’t you, that in a place so small everything that happened would be eagerly remembered. On the contrary, my neighbors take a very laidback approach to village news. Time and again I leave home and return keen to learn what has been going on in my absence. The conversation tends to go something like this:
Me: What’s been happening? What have I missed?
Ali, Mehmet, Fatma and co.: Nothing’s happened, Pat.
Me: What, no marriages, no babies, no deaths?
Ali, Mehmet, Fatma and co., after a short pause to consider: No, nothing at all, Pat.
The weeks roll by and slowly I discover what did, in fact, happen while I was away. The conversation tends to go something like this:
Me, accusingly: Why didn’t you tell me that X got married or that Y died?
Ali, Mehmet, Fatma and co., sheepishly: Oh, yes, I forgot.
And so it was with the census. No one thought to mention it, and only belatedly did I notice the signs around Nevşehir pointing out that June 30 was the final date for registration. Since then I have been trying to pluck up the courage to visit the İstatistik Kurumu (Statistics Association).
As any foreigner living here will probably agree, anything to do with paperwork is almost always disagreeable. Here it is mostly handled in the place I call Fortress Nevşehir, a grim triptych of concrete buildings fronted by a particularly lively equestrian statue of Atatürk with flag-waving citizens standing perilously close to the horses’ hooves. This is where we must go to extend our visas or apply for residency permits, encounters that, it is usually safe to assume, will take up many hours of our time as we traipse from one building to the next, collecting a set of signatures that wouldn’t look amiss on an international peace treaty.
But sometimes we can be pleasantly surprised, and so it was when I finally braved the statistics office. Inside a room that looked out over the remains of Nevşehir castle, a gaggle of workers exuded an impressive air of industry. A charming young woman ran through the predictable questions about my identity and the less predictable ones (at least to this yabancı) about my long-deceased father. It took less than 15 minutes and I came away wondering why I had dithered for so long.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
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