Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Ürgüp, Turkey

Iyí akşamlar!

Good evening from the moonscape of Cappadocia in the central plains of Turkey. Jason and I are on a short adventure (two weeks)—this time without the children who are home in Santa Fe enjoying Grandma and Grandpa. Jason’s salt-of-the-earth brother, Spencer, who also met us in Spain and Vietnam, has joined us with his urban-chic girlfriend, Sera, who has never been subjected to traveling Smirkman style. Our long-time Italian friend, Rolando, a global vagabond himself who often happens to be wherever in the world we have a hankering to travel, has also joined us for a few days to show us around his current home and, true to form, to illustrate its shortcomings.

Each morning begins with the haunting pre-dawn call to prayer, which drifts through the windows of our cave hotel courtesy of the loud speakers mounted to the minarets of our local mosque. Thanks to lingering jet lag (or perhaps to too many cups of Turkish coffee), I find it difficult to resume my slumber, and so I stumble down to breakfast. The next hour is devoted to savoring as many types of olives, cheese, nuts, dried fruits, yogurt and honey as possible while allowing Sera a chance to inhale enough coffee to properly dilute the level of blood in the caffeine stream.

Together, our motley crew has spent the past week exploring the fairy chimneys, prehistoric cave dwellings, and ancient underground cities of Anatolia. Each day we chose a new valley and head off for a trek into the surreal landscape, which is dotted with rose-colored cliffs and merengue-white hillsides that conjure up images of soft-serve ice cream machines gone haywire. Millennia ago, dwellings were carved into the gargantuan mushroom rocks that tower overhead, reminding me of smurf homes.

Rather than chubby blue creatures, however, historians tell us that the caves littering these bizarre lunar landscapes long ago sheltered pre-Hittite, early Christian, and later Byzantine troglodytes. (Troglodyte, by the way, is a fun word I just learned meaning cave dwellers; I can’t wait to get home and use it on my kids.) Early Christians left their mark on the area by converting hundreds of pre-existing caves into magnificent underground churches, many of which still stand bejeweled with intricate icons dating from 200-900 AD and depicting stories from the life of Christ. We have spent many an afternoon, crook-necked in cave-edrals, attempting to decipher colorful icons stretched across arched ceilings with the help of an occasional caption scrawled in ancient Greek (which lucky for us has some similarities with the phonetics of the Cyrillic alphabet, which we studied in Bulgaria). Now, being a Catholic-raised Kansas girl, I thought I had heard every bible story a dozen times, so I’ve been surprised to see a number of episodes from the life of Jesus that must have been left on the floor of the Church’s cutting-room. According to our art history buff, Rolando, these stories come from books of the gospel that were dismissed during the early days of Christianity. (Who knew, for example, that there was a story recounting the Verification of [Mary’s] Virginity?)

The caves have seen continuous use into modern Muslim times, according to a local named Amir who took us on a tour of Kaymakli, a city carved to an underground depth of six stories, which once sheltered 6,000 inhabitants. Amir’s family occupied a similar cave until the 1960’s when they moved up for some fresh air. I can’t blame them, and thanks to a healthy claustrophobia among a number of us, we’ve also spent a good deal of time above ground.

In addition to the call to prayer, I find that the squat toilets really help get you going in the morning. That and the omnipresent Turkish red tea—strong and bitter but quite pleasant when balanced with a half dozen sugar cubes—combine to keep you going strong all day long. Which is important when traveling with my husband who has a reputation for leading unsuspecting companions on jaunts that, although initially marketed as being pleasant strolls, are generally reflected back upon as being death marches. (Refer to travelogues from Peru, Thailand, Bulgaria, India, Portugal, Japan, etc.)

A number of such forced marches here in Cappadocia have seen us serendipitously stumbling upon some interesting local characters, such as portly, few-toothed ladies harvesting onions in headscarves and drop-crotched Hammer pants, and lonely shepherds, each donning a dusty but debonair sport coat, which seems to be the uniform of those of the shepherding profession. Though I’m getting better at initiating conversations (using one of the Turkish greetings I’ve memorized after a month’s worth of pod casts), the exchanges are usually cut short when my vocabulary runs out. As soon as they start conjugating verbs, I’m generally useless. Still, a few poorly-pronounced words of Turkish seem to go a long way in the goodwill category, and the Turkish people have been very hospitable.

We’re looking forward to one more day exploring Anatolian plains, and then we head to Istanbul for a week of urban Bacchanalia.

Hoşçakal!

Goodbye!

Angela