A History Lesson in Goreme
Added on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Deserted cave-village
15 km outside Nevsehir, on the Nevsehir-Gulsehir road, I came across a deserted cave-village with rock-cut dwellings and chapels. I needed something to occupy my head other than the road and inane conversations about fuel with gas station attendants.
The local inhabitants are great and I know they have stories if only I could prise them into the open in the short time that I have. Salt Miners who have spent 25 years 60 metres under the ground. Farmers who shepherd their cows beside busy roads. It goes on but these people have given places such as Aciksaray (Open Palace), a strong and proud importance, and I had the whole place to myself. Remarkable for its facades and the weird-looking formations it was actually a palace.
I had a spare hour and found some literature on the web. Apparently, the settlement can be dated back to the 10th or 11th centuries. It covers an area of one square kilometer and contains eight complexes gathered around three-sided courtyards, each with a decorated main facade. Neolithic communities in Anatolia and the Hittites are known to have found this place sacred. Sitting there, alone, a break from the road, I imagined it as it must have been, the court of the Hittites. That whole complex amused for an hour or so when I arrived in the heart of Capaddocia, Goreme.
Goreme is the heart of the tourist industry in Central Turkey. It is known world-wide for it’s troglodyte history and everywhere you see holes for windows and doors where a whole civilization lived in ‘apartments’ carved into the hard sediment that has not yet been eroded. Let’s have a history lesson: get this, the earliest indication of such caves is given for Armenia by the Greek author Xenophon, who in 401 BC passed through the highlands of Cappadocia together with Greek mercenaries on the way to Persia. He reports on the how wine, grain, fruit and vegetables were stored in underground magazines. Pliny the elder relates that in the 1st century AD of how grain was stored in subterranean silos in Cappadocia, a practice that is still very much alive, and apparently kept well for decades.
I was just about to go when someone pulled up in a land rover with a sign saying ‘Kapadokya Balloons’. A guy pulled up and recognized the number plate, then the bike, then me! Mike Green, one of the pilots of the company introduced himself and his son Alfi as having purchased a book from at the International Bike Show at the NEC last year. He invited me home where I managed to gem up on a bit of research with the prospect of a flight in the morning if the weather comes good.
