Ali’s Heritage Garden
One Man’s Efforts to Preserve Tradition Within a Popular World Heritage Site
Story and Photos by Rosie Cohan
Pink skid marks faded to purple on the blackening sky as lights popped on across Goreme, the rocky Turkish village below me. I had checked into my room and saw my friend, Ali, sitting alone on the terrace of his hotel which he built within the walls of his family’s cave home. Cave homes had been a common form of habitation in this rugged land for centuries. Ali’s chair was turned toward the valleys on the opposite side of the illuminated village. He was nursing a beer.
“Iyi Akshamlar,(Good Evening). May I join you?” I saw a flash of melancholy disappear from his face as he turned around. We hugged and kissed each other on both checks.
“Why are you sitting here alone?” Ali was hardly ever alone. He was usually in civic or business meetings, or with people who wanted something from him: advice, money or help. His curly silver-streaked hair glistened in the moonlight and his muscular body looked tight and tense. Only in his early forties, Ali looked much older from hard work and the stress of his success.
He answered in a faraway voice. “I was remembering my grandfather and his garden outside of the village. I loved working there as a boy. What would he think of Goreme now? What would he think of me?”
“He would be proud,” I answered. “You’ve built some of the best hotels in Cappadocia. You preserve the local environment and traditions. You employ many people and support others through your generosity. You have a beautiful family.”
Ali lowered his eyes and whispered, “I don’t know what’s right or good anymore.”
He resumed silently looking at the dark canyons. Having known Ali for 15 years, I sensed we were done talking. I sat quietly staring at the Tinker Bell lights shimmering in Goreme, which from many previous visits, had become a second home to me.
Goreme is in the heart of Cappadocia: a moonscape land covered with hundreds of phallic towers with tilting tips, mysterious arched caves, and conic tufa peaks called fairy chimneys. The fairy chimneys, a product of volcanic eruptions ten million years ago, are unique sculptures chiseled by wind, rain and snow. Adorned with painted Byzantine stories and icons, some were used as churches. Variegated earth-tone cliffs with rose-colored layers hide several underground cities that housed Christians seeking safety, first from the Romans and then from Turkish tribal regimes.
For centuries Cappadocia consisted of isolated subsistence farming communities. It became a tourist destination around 1985, when UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site. Now, pictures of fairy chimneys and colorful hot air balloons floating in the sky every morning are on brochures and tourist websites about Turkey. Goreme is a “must see” place in all the tour books.
At age 19 Ali had an arranged marriage and a year later a young daughter to support. As tourists came, he extended hospitality to guests to sleep in his home. When more came, Ali put extra beds in his family cave home and at his guests’ insistence, he charged a small amount of money. Demand exceeded the supply of rooms. Although he had never seen a hotel, through trial and error, he expanded his home and created the first cave hotel in Goreme.
Ali employed friends and neighbors. Local stonemasons melded each room into the structural integrity of the natural environment. Craftsmen created replicas of traditional Anatolian furniture and village women embroidered bed linens and towels. Scouring Cappadocia for old urns, doors, farming tools, he placed them artistically around the hotel, reminders of the area’s agrarian way of life. He talked to old villagers to harvest Cappadocian history. He became a steward of the area’s traditions.
The next morning, I walked to the village center. Shock assaulted me. Almost all of the cave homes had been replaced with hotels or restaurants. The old women who had gathered on the cobblestone path to gossip had disappeared. No girls were weaving their dowry rugs outside their homes. The communal mill, once a busy meeting place, was now empty. Hammering and drilling sounds shattered the peace. Before, the most noise one heard came from the clip-clop sound of donkey-led wagons and villager’s voices. Tourists and young locals sat in new cafés focused on their mobile devices drinking lattes instead of cay, Turkish tea, the life blood of Turkey.
I saw Ali on the main street. In a shaky voice with tears welling up I asked, “Where are all the villagers? What’s happened to Goreme?”
Ali explained that many had sold their caves homes for amounts of money they never could have imagined. Many built modern homes on the outskirts of town. They now worked in the hotels, restaurants, hot air balloon companies, travel agencies, making more money than they did from farming. “You can’t blame them for wanting a better life. Goreme could not stay the way you remember it. There is no going back.”
I wanted the villagers to have an easier life. But the traditional village I fell in love with was disappearing. Modernization was inevitable once Goreme opened up to tourism. I just didn’t realize it would happen so quickly.
Ali said, “I have decided to accept change in order to shape it.”
A few days later, Ali picked me up in a jeep and took me to where his grandfather’s garden had been. He was smiling and chatty, unlike the night on the terrace when melancholy shrouded him. We stopped at a steep community of ecru and rosy cliffs overlooking a rock-filled valley. Ali, in good shape for a middle aged man, scampered down the side of the cliff, a shower of loose stones in his wake.
“I must hurry to pay some workers. Can you make it down yourself? At the bottom, just follow the path.”
Not wanting to seem wimpy, I told him to go ahead. Soon I was perched on a narrow ledge frozen in place on the steep cliff. Climbing up and down cliffs must be part of the villagers’ DNA in this land of peaks and valleys. Missing those chromosomes, I made the descent the best way I could, on my butt.
I followed a narrow path to a clearing surrounded by pockmarked cliff faces. From previous visits, I recognized these cavities as deserted pigeon houses. As a boy, Ali had cleaned pigeon houses, as pigeon poop had been a valuable commodity as a fertilizer. A man was judged worthy of marriage by the number of pigeon houses his family owned. If you were rich in pigeon poop, you were a good catch.
But pigeons disappeared after the appearance of commercial fertilizers about thirty years earlier. The garden was overgrown with dense brush, the fruit trees dormant, and the vineyard fallow. Huge boulders had fallen blocking the surrounding caves.
“I will make an organic garden here to honor the old ways,” Ali announced, his dark eyes shining.
“Great,” I said forcing enthusiasm. But, I couldn’t imagine how he could reincarnate the garden of his youth in this desolate valley.
Two years later I returned to Goreme and again stayed at Ali’s Kelebek Hotel. Ali invited me to join hotel guests to make pekmez, a syrup made from grape juice thickened with mineral-filled local clay. It’s the local cure-all, healing everything from the flu to a hangover. I accepted, but dreaded the climb down.
The next morning, a tractor coughing heavily crawled up the steep road towing a large, wooden ark-like contraption. We jumped on and it chugged above the village through fairy chimneys and fields of yellow squash while Ali shared his memories of agrarian life in his grandfather’s time. His passionate descriptions of the culture and community captivated us.
When we arrived at the spot where I slid down the cliff, I saw stone steps and a rope-railing. With a mischievous smile, Ali whispered, “I learned from your visit I had to build a path down to the garden. You won’t need your ass.” He didn’t mean my donkey.
At the bottom of the cliff, we passed an orchard with trees drooping under the weight of blushing apples, chartreuse quince and purple figs. Rose bushes, geraniums and nasturtium replaced the previously tangled overgrowth.
Two smiling sunbaked women dressed in embroidered headscarves and patterned pantaloons were standing over an oven carved into the rock. They were making gozleme, dough rolled very thin like a tortilla, and baked over a wood- burning fire. A picnic table was set with a Turkish breakfast: boiled eggs (gathered from the chickens strutting around); locally made yogurt and cheeses; tomatoes, cucumbers, olives cured with local spices and garlic all from Ali’s garden. I heard echoes of cooing in the once-barren complex of dovecotes. Ali had acquired 2,000 pigeons to produce organic fertilizer.
After breakfast, we hiked to harvest plump bunches of grapes. They were brought to another part of the garden where Ali had built a village house with a flat roof. In the past, I observed barefooted women pull up their pantaloons and dance on their rooftops stomping the grapes. We donned rubber boots, and while slipping and sliding on the rooftop, took turns crushing the grapes.
Lusty aromas of sizzling lamb and bulgur with tomato sauce called us back to the eating area. A local wine maker poured wine, which after a few glasses, might have rivaled wines of Napa or Bordeaux.
Ali hired a saz player to serenade us. A saz is a traditional stringed instrument with a deep rounded back.
With black hair and clothing, the musician looked like a Turkish Johnny Cash, singing soulful Turkish songs.
Without noticing it, the day had slipped away. We piled into jeeps, having experienced a taste of traditional agrarian life in Cappadocia.
That night, I reflected on how complicated the impact of tourism is on a community. It had brought prosperity to many and funded education and social services. Yet, tourism brought cultural change, increased traffic, and strained the ecology of the area. Shifts in family life and friendships were occurring due to the 24/7 nature of tourism and competition for tourist dollars. Conscious efforts, such as Ali’s, are needed to manage change and preserve traditions, the landscape, and other attributes that had made Goreme so appealing in the first place.
Keeping one foot in the past, another in the present, and his eyes on the future, Ali had found ways to weld together the double-edged sword of preservation and progress. The making of gozleme and pekmez, and the melodies of the saz floating through the canyons where pigeons now fly, are keeping the collective memory alive.
Ali bounded up the stone steps and interrupted my thoughts. “Tomorrow night I am celebrating the full moon with a barbecue in the garden. Will you come?”
“I wouldn’t miss it!” I replied smiling gratefully.
I think Ali’s grandfather would be smiling too.
