Turkey 2: Into the Depths of Cappadocia
Fairy towers, goblin cities, and white horses, a gripping tale with literal cliffhangers and literal gripping, of a journey into the depths of Turkey!
The gravelly slope gives way beneath my feet — a cascade of sand, a hiss like waves running back to the sea, scrabbling fruitlessly for traction I go slithering down into the canyon. The slope curves into a hump like a ski jump halfway down. I slide helplessly towards this unintentional launch. By spreading my arms and legs, flattening myself against the rough slope I manage to slow to a stop just before I’m launched into the airy void. Pebbles continue to skitter past me, I stand up, wipe sweat from my brow, and look across the rugged canyon: manila colored sandstone — more sand than stone, the sides a sheer drop in most places. Thick tower-like rock formations rise above the jumbled slopes, jutting into the blue cloudless sky. The sun reflects mercilessly off the buttresses of rock, and I gaze longingly down into the bottom of the canyon, green with waves of tufty grass and scraggly shrubs. I look back up the slope I just slipped down and realize there’ll be no getting back up. Below me, the steep slope is a steep tumult of boulders and crevices. There’s only one way to go now, down there, somehow.
Three days earlier (August 19th 2013 if you really must know) after a fight with the Turkish girl I was dating, I decided to head out to the further destinations of Turkey alone. But how? It seemed a bit overwhelming trying to wrap my mind around Turkish public transit by myself (in 2013, nowadays googlemaps might sort you right out).
I walked into a travel agent in Sultanahmet, central old town, but he would hear of nothing other than signing me up for a bunch of package tours. After proposing a string of them he put his hand out for a handshake. A clever trap, social conventions make it awkward to ignore a proffered handshake but would also make it the agreement to a deal. “I’ll shake your hand to be polite, but not in agreement to any deals,” I said, and escaped that place.
I decided to try one more, True Blue Tours who upon hearing what I wanted kindly lined me up with exactly that, precise instructions on which buses to take and how, and a booking at a hotel in Cappadocia, nothing more. As a consequence, I’m forever recommending them.
So I caught a small bus on a nearby corner, and it wound through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal loomed before us, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallowed us as we drove down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I found myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs didn’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumbered out of the darkness like mythical beasts. There were crowds of people waiting in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here were almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vented greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than oily pavement. I ping-ponged through with a few well-placed questions to people who looked like they knew their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
I climbed the steps into the bus and entered a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we rolled out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we were rumbling through the purpling dusk across the Bosporus Bridge, from Europe to Asia, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
We flew down the highway through the night, and I was mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exited to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rose over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
Suddenly around a bend, a town came into view that looked like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses melded into doorways and windows in the rockface itself, rock spires reared up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We were in Cappadocia!
We wound through another town or two before arriving at my destination, the town of Göreme. Here I checked in to one of many “cave hotels,” where rooms were bored right into the soft sandstone cliff walls. Thick Turkish rugs carpeted the floor, like dark-red warm soft squishy moss.
I intentionally chose a big “dormitory” room to meet others since I was traveling by myself. I’ve found that, while in hostels in Western Europe you often meet people on their gap year and/or first travels abroad, and somehow they seem even more young and wild in hostels in Australia, Turkey is no one’s first trip abroad or party destination. People I met in hostels in Turkey were engineers, young professionals, middle-aged couples, a decidedly more mature group than in some other places.
First up, the main reason I wanted to go to Cappadocia, the underground cities! There are over 200 underground cities of two or more floors in the Cappadocia region, believed to have been mostly built between 780–1180 AD. I would be headed to the second biggest one, Kaymaklı, with over 100 tunnels, and “only” the first four underground floors open to tourists. It apparently once housed 15,000 people which is a lot even for an aboveground city at the time.
I generally dislike package tours but it was the only practical way to get from Göreme to Kaymaklı. I signed up through the hotel manager and the next morning a little van-bus came to pick us up (interesting fact: the mini-van-buses in Turkey are called dolmaş, which sounds very much like the delicious stuffed grapeleaf dish dolma does it not? Because they both derive from the Turkish word “dolmaş” meaning “stuffed!”). With me in the bus were two women from Brazil, a father and daughter from Curaçao, and a whole family from Sudan of all places.
“Cappadocia” comes from Greek for the white horses that used to live wild here, but you won’t see any anymore” our guide informed us as we drove through the dry landscape to Kaymaklı, rumpled hills and surreal spires always in the middle distance.
The entrance to the underground city is right in the heart of the modern village of Kaymaklı — as with all such things these days it’s surrounded by a cacophony of sales booths and hawkers, but once you get through the ticket turnstiles you descend by a downramp of a tunnel into a broad room. This, our guide informs us, was the stables, since the horses and such weren’t too keen on traveling further down. Makes sense. Immediately sets me on a series of Tolkienesque imaginings, in this case, the scene in The Hobbit (the book) where they sleep in a cave and awake to find goblins leading their horses away.
Our guide led us from there through the winding narrow tunnels, steep stairs, and warrens of rooms. The feelings of a goblin city stayed strongly with me. Electric cables snaked unobtrusively along the walls powering overhead lights so it was well-lit. Occasional vertical shafts functioned as wells, ventilation, and secret entrances disguised as wells. Other chimneys and air vents, we were told, came out under rocks on the surface. We passed a huge millstone in a niche to the side of the passage, which could be rolled out to block the passage from invaders. It even had a peephole in the middle. In lower levels, there was a church, a winery, and even a bronze smelter!
Apparently, the reasons for the underground cities were twofold — first of all it was nice and cool down there, but also at the time they were built these were Christian settlements on the very edge of the Byzantine Empire, as it was slowly encroached upon by Arab Muslim raiders. While our guide was explaining this to us, a Turkish man who happened to be nearby began berating him that it wasn’t true, that it was Muslims taking refuge from Christians in the cities, but, well, clearly there’s a church, among other things.
After their heyday the cities gradually fell into disuse and were forgotten about, until for example, in the case of this one, a shepherd followed a lost goat into a hole in the ground and found it kept going and going and going.
Emerging from the underground city, we were next taken to a buffet lunch for tourists at a hotel in Üçhisar, a particularly fantastical-looking hilltop town with natural stone spires rising above it with windows in them. I heaped my plate with a sample of many different things and… found them all to be awful. As I commented in last story, it’s been my experience that the kind of buffets these package tours visit are absolutely not representative of the quality of local cuisine.
From there we went walking through some of the narrow canyons near Göreme. There were many dovecots carved out of the canyon walls, and the canyon floor was narrow and winding — sometimes we had to go through tunnels that had been carved through the walls (you may be noticing a common theme about Cappadocia, the stone is irresistibly carvable). Most surprising of all, when you thought you were deep in the winding labyrinthine canyons you’d suddenly come upon a little stand where some enterprising local was selling freshly squeezed orange juice and hot tea. Want a cold soda? They’ll go into the cave behind them and emerge with a soda as cold as if it had been refrigerated.
We finally emerged at an abandoned Greek town, which had also been carved into hillsides (because of course it had), but had been depopulated during the “population exchange of 1923,” when all Christians were expelled from Turkey. Many of the cave dwellings here had fallen into an advanced state of disrepair due to earthquakes, but several were being renovated into hotels for modern tourism, and we even got to poke around some that were in good repair and for sale as modern residences. It was kind of interesting to see them with bare walls and floors, since the ones I’d been in before, such as the hostel I was staying in, had the floors covered in rugs and with various pieces of furniture they are quite nice (if a bit cold) and, you know, hobbit-hole like.
The next day I went walking myself, thinking I’d explore another nearby valley. Getting lost I found myself on the rim instead of in it, and thinking it would be an easy descent I found myself in the predicament at the beginning of this story. After a tough scramble involving at least one scary jump across a precipice, I was able to find my way to the valley floor. It was full of large scrubby bushes but the dry wash in the center formed a natural sort of path. I proceeded up the valley because I thought the main trail should be that way. I finished the mere 500ml of water I’d brought with me but surely, like the canyons of the day before there would be a man in a cave selling fresh orange juice just around the next corner? Alas, it was not to be, as sweat ran down my forehead and my throat got ever more dry. I began to feel seriously worried — no one knows I’m here, I could die here and maybe they’d find my bleached bones months later.
But wait, is that movement up ahead? People? I excitedly rounded the next corner only to startle a white horse, who looked at me and darted quickly off into the shrubbery. Damn. But on the plus side here’s a wild grapevine draped over a low scrubby tree like a heavy cloak, thick bundles of plump grapes hang down from its branches. I grab grapes by the handful and stuff them in my mouth without bothering to dust them off. They are delicious and refreshing. I eat as many as I can stomach and then take a large sprig of them with me as I continue up the gorge.
The valley narrows, but fortunately, the sides are also more traversable at the deep back end, the slippery gravel held together with coarse grass. I’m able to ascend the back slope on a steep narrow goat path. I finally emerge over the rim of the valley, dusty and tired, to see the great rock of Üçhisar close in front of me, surrounded by its haphazard brood of houses, hotels, and cafes (the picture above is literally after I’ve just emerged). Some tourists stare wide-eyed as I climb from the canyon rim.
“Where’d you come from??”
“Um, I don’t even know.” exhausted, I gesture vaguely.
And then I wandered into Üçhisar to find authentic food among the fantastical tooth-like rocks.
