There I would sit, happily soaking up the music and listening to my friends switch with enviable ease between English, French and Turkish, depending on whom they were talking to. It was all so very civilized, I thought, and a world away from my humdrum life back in Bristol. But it was the music that mattered most of all. I had always loved music, preferring to listen to favorite albums while friends were watching television. I was never going to be able to settle in another country whose music didn’t touch my soul, but now, as friends whispered translations of the lyrics into my ear, I began to pick out favorite songs and so took a tentative first step on the path towards living here.
All this history came back to me recently when the Turkish singer-songwriter Latif Bolat arrived in Göreme, bringing with him a group of American Sufis. For the last few years Latif has been a regular visitor, using the village’s lesser-known churches as makeshift concert halls. Usually we head for the Bezirhanı, an extraordinary church carved into the rockface at the back of Göreme. Externally the only clues to its presence are three carved horseshoe arches, but inside it is a vast edifice, its walls and ceilings completely blackened with soot beneath which, apparently, lurk 11th-century frescoes. Some years ago this church was bought by a Frenchman who planned to turn it into a piano bar. Unfortunately for him -- but fortunately for the rest of us, perhaps -- the piano never made it past Customs.
This time, however, the venue had been moved to the seventh century Durmuş Kadır church. The evening started off in predictably chaotic fashion as some of us made for the Bezirhanı and others for the Durmuş Kadır, but no sooner had I crossed the threshold than all that was forgotten and I was in seventh heaven.
Right in the middle of the church stands a rock-cut, stepped pulpit which makes a perfect perch for candles. Latif was joined by two fantastic Göreme-grown musicians, saz player Yunuz and drummer Ali, as well as by a flamenco guitarist who played a haunting Sephardic Jewish song from İstanbul. In the shimmering light cast by the candles, members of the Sufi group read out mystic poetry. One Turkish-American member of the audience was so enraptured that I even caught her playing air bağlama.
For myself, I was almost reduced to tears by the romance of it all. Where else in the world, I thought, could I have reclined on oriental carpets in an ancient rock-cut church lit only by candles and listened to glorious acoustic music with friends? As the magical sounds swirled around me, I felt myself more privileged than the wealthiest night clubber at İstanbul’s Reina.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
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