Konya and Goreme

We have chosen to stop in Konya for a night on the way through to Goreme, as the trip is several hours. Konya is the former home of Rumi, the great Sufi poet (1207-1273).

Between 1150 and 1300, the Sultans of Rum beautified Konya, erecting many lovely buildings and mosques. It was during this period that Rumi came to live in Konya. Mevlana Rumi is generally known in the west simply by the name Rumi (which means Anatolian) or in the east as Maulana Rumi. In Turkey he is universally referred to as Mevlana (the Turkish spelling of Maulana – which means ‘Our Master’).

While we’ve been in Turkey we have become increasingly more blasé about our dress code, as shorts and singlets seems to be the go for most tourists. Walking around in Konya, I suddenly become aware that no woman on the street is wearing shorts or short sleeves. In fact, I can’t see a bit of leg anywhere and not a single tourist. Konya is obviously a more religiously conservative town and the last day of the month of Ramazan (as it is known in Turkey), feels like Christmas Eve. Leading up to 8.30pm when the sun sets, the restaurants are all full and we wait to have our dinner until the call from the mosque, when everyone is clearly celebrating being together with their families.

Our hotel is very close to the central square and both the Mevlana Museum and the mosque. There are a lot of explosions which we assume are fireworks or canons but it’s a bit nerve-wracking considering the current situation in Turkey. We even spend quite some time in the middle of the night imagining what would happen if there was an explosion on the street under our window. These thoughts are not the best for a restful night’s sleep.

Usually, to mark the end of Ramazan, there is a three-day public holiday. This year, in an attempt to boost the ailing tourist industry, the Government have declared a nine-day holiday instead.

The Mevlana Museum, which houses Rumi’s tomb, is free today and we join the hundreds of Turkish people who have assembled in the square in their best clothes, to visit Rumi’s tomb.

Mevlana, the former monastery of the whirling dervishes of Konya was converted into a museum in 1927. Rumi is also well known for the Sufi brotherhood he established with its distinctive whirling and circling dance, known as Sema and practised by the Dervishes.

We had discussed that we wouldn’t congregate in large groups in public places, but the atmosphere is celebratory and our presence there is causing a lot of interest and people are approaching us to try out their English and have photos.

From somewhere in the distance there are continuous gun shots which is a little hard to ignore. I am aware of Roger scanning the crowd continuously and rather than hassle him for his paranoia like I usually would, I feel safer that he is keeping an eye on our surroundings.

We see a 3 year old walking around with a very realistic toy automatic rifle which is ironic.

There is not much space to stop and reflect in Rumi’s tomb as there is a continuous push of people inside and it is a relief to get outside again.

We head to Goreme after lunch, a three-hour drive away, where the landscape becomes increasingly more otherworldly as we approach Cappadocia.

We have accommodation booked but the cancellation terms are pretty flexible. I had chosen a cool cave hotel with a pool when I booked a year ago, but we cancelled it last week to compensate for the money we spent on our boat trip. Whilst half of Turkey seem to be holidaying too, there must have been a number of tourist cancellations after the airport attack and we realise that we can just choose somewhere on arrival.
While I am surreptitiously scoping the hotel we have booked, a slightly crazy dog has a go at Louie who is exploring, whilst in the meantime, Roger has walked into a guest-house and been shown the most enormous cave room with a Turkish Hamaam. That seals the deal. It’s not until about half an hour later that Louie reveals that there were actually two dogs and they punctured the skin in two places on his legs. This raises the issue of what to do in a rabid dog attack. Stella, who took photos of the dogs, produces one as evidence and I must say, it looks slightly crazed with a red eye. We’ve all had rabies shots. In fact, we had $1500 worth of rabies shots alone, but it is still necessary to have a rabies booster shot after a bite. After some local investigation, we decide that the risk is low and we’ll give it three to six weeks to see if Louie starts foaming at the mouth. We’ll keep you posted!

The entrance to our room.

Our room at the Aydinli Caves is crazily opulent. It was formerly a 300 year old stable and then a dance and function space so we have quite a lot of room. The bathroom is as big as most of the places we have stayed and the Hamaam leads off the bathroom into the oldest, most original part of the cave. We are really quite stumped about the Hamaam. There is a big marble slab with hot water basins on either side and all we can think to do with it, is use our complimentary bottles of shampoo and conditioner and slide around on our bottoms. The boys spend several hours doing this.

The room is dark and cool (it is a cave after all) and there is so much space and the fun of the Hamaam, not to mention school work to catch up on, that it is a couple of days before we really feel the need to explore. Stella spends a lot of time in the bathroom singing and playing guitar because the acoustics are amazing.

There is no need to go far to find amazing scenery. Everywhere you look it is spectacular.

Our first expedition is, of course, to a carpet shop. There is a New Zealand woman who has lived in Göreme for 27 years and owns a carpet shop almost next door, so we make that our first stop. Three hours later and we’re ready to leave. Carpets are not really in our budget but it’s always nice to spend an afternoon drinking apple tea and looking at beautiful things. Ruth, the owner is also really cool and Jasper makes a short film (unbeknownst to us) called “Expensive Mum”.

This is usually how a shop looks when we have left.

The next day’s outing is to a nearby underground city of Kaymakli.
It is the perfect place for exploring on a hot day and when we get to the third story underground, it gets quite cold. It is crazy to think of whole cities of people living like this. Because of the strategic position of Cappadocia as the gateway to important trade routes like the Silk Road, the Hattis, the Hittites, Phrygians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans have all put their own stamp on this area. As a result, it became a much sought after area, culturally and politically, and it was necessary for the local inhabitants to live underground for long periods of time.

Cappadocia is a region of very famous Byzantine cave churches and we stop at one on the way home.

There was a time when we thought that we might go ballooning in Göreme as many people come to the area just to do that. Having got an idea of the price per person (around 120 Euro each) we decide we may be returning home early if we continue to have too many once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Sometimes, just being in a place is amazing enough.

We decide instead, having been woken up at 4.30am by a herd of lucky people shouting excitedly while leaving for their own balloon trips, to get up really early and watch them all in the sky. We zoom off in the car to where we suspect they will all leave from and when we round the bend there is a queue of balloons all lifting off and already several in the sky.

It is really spectacular and the sound of the giant flames lifting the balloons is amazing in the quiet of the dawn. We drive from the lift-off site to a look-out and then on to where they appear to be landing. It is obviously unpredictable where they might land as the utes and large trailers that transport the balloons chase them around as they move in the sky.

The landscape is very beautiful at sunrise and we have such a great time that we decide to do it all again the next morning so we can watch the balloons fill.

While Göreme has the biggest concentration of cave houses, there are a number of other settlements nearby that have been thriving communities in the past, like the Valley of Zelve which is now an open-air museum but which was a community up until about 1960, when the area was deemed structurally unsound. Now it is possible to wander around and climb into the cave houses and small cliff-side churches. We have a wonderful afternoon here, exploring although the security guy blows his whistle every time someone strays off the designated area.

On our way home we stop in at the Göreme open-air museum which is mostly a collection of Byzantine churches, some with beautiful frescoes. We meet our first Turkish scam-artist who tries to convince us that at 6pm the museum is so full of visitors that we should definitely come back the next day, as the public holiday will be finished. As an alternative, he suggests that we do a pottery workshop about 20km away.

1. We don’t need to be carrying pottery around too
2. We just came from that direction
3. The public holiday extends for a couple more days and we can see that the car park is virtually empty.

We get inside and spend a nice couple of hours wandering around in the setting sun, climbing ladders into beautiful churches and tombs with very few other people but by that stage in the day, we have been up since 4am and we are ready for a lie down.

Whoever termed the geological formations around Cappadocia as ‘fairy chimneys’ had quaint sensibilities and a good imagination. It doesn’t take long for us to rename them Penis Rocks, as let’s face it………….

After our early wakeup the next day, which was as equally cool as the day before, as we arrived as the first utes and trailers were arriving and watched them fill the balloons with huge fans and then blow the flames in from the baskets laying on their sides. One of the balloons (obviously a budget ride) had over 25 people in the basket and was quite slow to get off the ground. The balloons drifted in a different, more photogenic direction, across the fairy chimneys where we had walked and then landed all around us.

Louie and I had carpet business later that day. Having perused a number of shops in Goreme town, we are now ready to start the bargaining process (even if it comes to nothing). Louie is very good in this regard and translates Turkish Lira into NZ dollars then puts price labels on bits of paper on all of the carpets. I spent weeks sitting in Carpet shops when I lived in Istanbul and eventually bought one which I carried back to the UK (where I fell over at the bottom of the escalator because I had too many things). That carpet has since been chewed up and pissed on by a number of dogs and it is time for a new one.

When you love filling your home with special things, as I do, and knowing that such things are always more expensive at home in NZ, it is hard to pass through a place which specialises in those things and not just stop and have a look and perhaps discuss prices. I think it’s called consumerism but we will disguise it as interest in local craft.

Many old Kilims in Turkey are made as dowry items and then added to after the marriage, or made to commemorate someone’s life. This amazing one from 1939 has the image of Ataturk and Inönü, the Prime Minister that followed him.

At 8pm that night, we have finished our negotiations. All in all, we were in the shop for 5 hours, although that did include sharing breakfast with the owners and stopping for apple tea breaks. Louie now knows exactly how to tell natural from artificial dyes, comment on the weave and tightness and estimate a carpet’s age. We are sending home four all together. Perhaps three more than we had agreed with Roger but we got a bulk discount and there are no tourists buying carpets at the moment so we are literally keeping the industry afloat!

The next morning we say a sad farewell to our hosts at the Aydinli Caves.

We fly out of Kayseri (about an hour away) and spend the last night in Istanbul near Atatürk airport as we have an early morning flight.

We are sad to leave Turkey. I’m not sure whether it is the awareness that we are at the half-way point in our trip, that is causing us to feel more wistful about the places we are leaving. We have met some beautiful people in Turkey and we have promised to return, although it may not be for another twenty years.