July 8, Wednesday - Cappadocia: Once again, we made the right choice and handed over our decision making to a tour provider. Mustaffa did well enough yesterday that we decided to go with him again. Some of the sights were repeats (for me) from last year, and I was skeptical of my assistant's willingness to look at more caves and churches, but we decided that we did not come here to rest ourselves but to drink in things Turkish – so off we went.
Good thing! It was a really nice day, and even the repeat stuff was better than before. A lot of it involved scenery and terrain – which really is remarkable here – but we also visited a few craft places (pottery and rug weaving) – and it was all good.
The major sight in the morning was the outdoor museum at Goreme. This was a hidden monastery originally but gradually came into publicity and importance before fading away to become a merely local oddity (all these Christian drawings in the old caves). It got a bit more of the backstory this time through. Supposedly the area – simple dwellings and four of five cave churches - were founded by Saints Theodore and Gregory(?) in the second or third century. They were from the Levant (Jerusalem) and were early proseletyzers of the new Christianity. At that time, of course, Christianity was persecuted so maintaining a hidden monastery in a distant and unlikely place worked nicely as an education program. Generations of Christian missionaries were educated and trained here and sent out across the Roman Empire.
When Constantine converted, places like this came out into the sunlight (only figuratively). So there is a layer of crude wall paintings covered by a layer of much more elaborate frescoes (after the place received money from the Emperor). Unlike the cave paintings yesterday, these ones were well preserved. My assistant earned his keep by bringing a better camera that was capable of getting good interior shots without a flash in dimmer light. We'll see – if he disappoints on this I am gong to cut back his Raku ration.
I had seen this museum last year, but it was nice to see it again. Also, it was better explained and a lot less crowded. When I was in those places last year it was like being in a subway. This time through we had those Byzantine churches all to ourselves.
OK – I am hearing, again through back channels, that my readers find the historical/cultural reflections tedious. It is said they simply want more food and carpets. Well .... more on that later.
One more thing: In the afternoon we went to see Zelve – a cave city that was an inhabited village until quite recently. Our guide knew the place – and the original village – quite well and did a really good job bringing out exactly what the routines of such a life were like. The landscape, not only here but all over Cappadocia, is quite amazing. The life of living off these little gardens in hidden valleys among these caves made sense - and that is what you hope from a good tour, the ability to see how human life goes on in these very strange circumstances.
Later on we went to the pottery town, Avanos – and saw the (once again, in a cave) workshop of a pottery manufacturing studio there. They showed us the various grades of clay they used – a quartz clay being of very highest quality which was used in the tile work of the finest imperial Mosques in Turkey (e.g. The Blue Mosque). My #2 got some good shots of the store there – the pottery was quite expensive and the top quality stuff was fantastically costly (e.g. $900 for a square foot tile). We thought our money might be more effectively spent on other crafts. The charm of the pottery really is in the very very exceedingly amazingly detailed decoration. You'll have to wait for the pictures.
Then we got to go the the carpet factory – which was really neat. After seeing the girls learning to weave on the looms we went into the store area. The weaving school/factory was neat. Their finest work is a silk on silk weaving that is done at such a high knot count that it takes the girls months and years to complete even a small piece – but even a BluRay DVD cannot match the results. After that we got to see them extracting the silk from the cocoons - and thence on into the show rooms. This was a very large room with a bench around the edges. The owner/manager narrates the carpet show as his trained assistants unroll and display carpet after carpet. Again, my assistant was at it with the camera – this time using mine as his own had run out of batteries in the last church cave at Goreme.
I purchased another kilim – and my assistant was unsuccessful when his bid was not accepted. But, as he said later, you know you are negotiating correctly when you leave without a carpet, at least you know you are not bidding too high. As for me, I am happy once again. You get a nice come down in the price and figure it looks great and in any case costs a lot less than what you can get at Macy's.
The carpet factory was great. You got to see some really stunning carpets – stuff that makes sense of it's $30,000 price tag – and the haunting worry that most of what I have bought is simply crap from China.
Dinner: the usual four courses on the terrace looking at the illuminated caves across the valley.
Tomorrow: long long long bus ride to Antalya. Bloggin might be interrupted for a day.
Without a professional tour guide telling us where to go, what to eat, how to think, when to leave, what to photograph... I am not sure how we will make out tomorrow, but we'll try.
One might suspect that this is a leisured and fattening life. Yet clambering up and down these mountain paths in the sun - ducking inito the shade for relief - squeezing ourselves through cave passages and crawling up and down stairways while crouched over -it's all part of a healthy Cappadocian lifestyle.
Most Remarkable Thing: In a day of remarkable things, I'd have to say those two prize winning silk carpets they rolled out were stunning. One was mostly colored a deep rich purple and the other had a kind of sky blue interior. The design involved lots of traditional elements and a kind of off balance swirling design. My vision of the carpet arts has been extended. The silk extraction process was also amaziing – seeing this little cocoon unroll into a mile of fine silk.
Photo: A shallow serving dish in the Avanos pottery studio - one of the high quality quartz clay stuff. If you need to ask how much.....
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