Perhaps the most serendipitous of all these bonuses are the fantastic tricks that the light sometimes plays with the Cappadocian landscape. For much of the year, it's as predictable as the crowds outside the open-air museum -- a blistering white in summer that strips the color from the stonework and bounces it back into your eyes so that to step outside without shades is to risk blindness, then a morose grey throughout the winter which deadens the tone and renders everything in shades of putty.
Ah but, the photographers will say, if you only got up earlier you would be able to experience a more graduated palette, and I'm sure they're right except that I'm never going to be one of those “up with the larks” types for whom dawn is a delight. By far the best time of the day as far as I'm concerned is early evening when the sun is just starting to set. I live, you see, exactly opposite Aktepe (White Hill), a great plateau of rock left behind by geological convulsions in prehistory. The rock is as many-layered as a wedding cake and as multicolored as a fashion model in autumn: red, yellow, orange, brown, beige and grey. What's more, there's a lineup of mini fairy chimneys marching purposefully around its base. The rock is the reason I bought my house in Göreme. OK, so it may not quite match up to life as lived on the lip of the Grand Canyon, but it's as near as I'm ever going to get to experiencing it.
The light on that rock at around six o'clock is always incandescently beautiful and can be guaranteed to stop me dead in my tracks even on the worst of days when deadlines have slipped by and a chunk of rock has come crashing down from the kitchen ceiling. But every now and then, just when I'm least expecting it, the setting sun will pull out all the stops, and it will be as if someone is standing behind the plateau and shining a spotlight on it. Suddenly every single ridge of that rock, every single layer of its makeup, will be standing out as if shouting for personal attention. It's a fleeting experience, so fleeting in fact that there have been occasions when there wasn't even time to grab the arm of a companion to attract their attention before, poof, nature flicked a switch and that brilliant backlit wonderfulness was snapped off again, with the suddenness and totality of a power cut at dinnertime.
A few years ago, the path of a solar eclipse passed right over Göreme, and friends flocked here to picnic amid the fairy chimneys while we waited for the moment to put on our protective eyeglasses and gawp at this wonder of nature. “Marvelous, unforgettable,” we all agreed, but the truth is that it's those rare days when the solar fireworks kick in on Aktepe that most stand out in my memory. It's the unexpectedness that makes the experience so magical. And it's what makes living here such a never-ending wonder.
* Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
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