Village Life

View of the Hisar from a vantage point in the
Balkan Valley

For a small village like Ortahisar, tourism is number one of the economic base, followed by fruit storage. Since the older part of town in built on top of, or into the Swiss cheese cliffs leading down into dry (at the moment) riverbeds, there are many deep cave rooms where the temperature remains about 45-55 degrees year round. On the mesa tops, closer to the four-lane road that runs from Nevsehir to Urgup, more modern buildings sit atop dug out caverns with sloped entrances for trucks to back into. These are full from mid winter to the following autumn with citrus and from autumn till summer with potatoes. The citrus are lemons and oranges. This area has some farms but the crops are mostly grapes for the wineries, and vegetables, grown only in summer. Further south along the coast, the warmth permits year round crops where they can also grow citrus and palm trees. Dates, nuts, wheat, and figs are a big part of the agricultural base of the country.  With enough water, Turkey could supply food for the entire Middle East.

When a cavern is unloaded, a number of the lemons have dried up and these are tossed into long bags and sold for $4 Turkish lira apiece, about $2.20 American dollars. Evelien purchased five of these heavy bags and brought them home to store in her own large cave room. She uses them all winter as fire starters. The oils in the dry skin light quickly and give a nice aroma to a wood or coal fire.

Market day is Saturday, when people bring in
the produce from their large gardens for sale in Urgup.

Evelien’s house sits atop three cave rooms. My apartment is made from one of them, partitioned off inside with blocks made from the same tuff rock, so the whole thing feels like a cave, though portions, the kitchen for example, are actually constructed outside of the original cave. It has one door, hobbit-sized, that I can pass through, but anyone taller than 5’3” would have to duck. The door is made of planks of wood and security consists of two sliding pieces of wood that go into the frame. One has a handle on the outside; the night piece is accessible only from the inside. A window above the door swings open. It is protected by four steel bars, artfully decorated with bits of drift wood and glass “evil eyes”.  That window provides all the fresh air to the apartment.

In town, there is a large parking area in a triangle. The Mosque is in one corner; shops, a hotel and restaurants line the other sides. Giant tour buses park here and disgorge hoards of people with sunglasses and cameras dangling. They wander about the town, purchase a few dried fruits, nuts, a glass of freshly squeezed pomegranate or orange juice, and maybe buy some dishes or embroidered tablecloths from the vendors. My friend Ali, who owns an antique shop, does a fairly lively business in spite of seeming to be uninterested in selling anything. He loves chatting with people. The tour drivers all know him and sit around his short tables on little Turkish padded stools smoking and having a cup of coffee or tea.  Up and down the street are four Tea Houses always full of men chatting, playing board games, and watching the people passing on the street. It’s a testosterone charged town, few local women are around, ever. They have better things to do than hang out in the town. Last Friday, there were no tour buses for some reason, and the town seemed particularly vacant of women. When I became aware of it, I looked around and there were men coming into the parking area from all over, lining up in front of Ali’s shop in an orderly bunch of rows, a serious solemn mood all round. Not another woman in sight. It was a little frightening. Ali’s shop was closed, a rarity, so I hightailed it down the hill with my groceries. Jim later told me he thought it must be the Friday prayers, but the next day, Ali said it was a funeral. Women do not attend funerals. They have their own weeping sessions together, privately, and at a home. A local man, about 42, had been killed on the highway when he tried to cross the road.

This woman rolled out a large "pancake" much
like a flour tortilla only thinner, filled it with cheese
and meat, then it's folded over and baked. 

There are several grocery stores in town, a couple of bakeries specializing in pita breads, called pide here, and the lovely small round loaves of soft whole wheat. French baguettes are also popular, and chunks of baguette bread are served in baskets in all the restaurants. In addition, there are a few vegetable/fruit markets where the owners stand outside using  fruit presses to create those delicious drinks. A small glass of orange juice, about 6 ounces, sells for 2 lira ($1 US). Evelien has one of those presses so I used it the other day to process the abundance of pomegranates I had. However, there are juice pomegranates and eating pomegranates. The ones for juice are quite small and fit the press perfectly. Most of the seeds inside pop but the larger ones are too big and half the pomegranate can be wasted. Unfortunately, the bitter white ‘skin’ that separates sections of seeds also gets squashed and adds a disagreeable flavor. The majority of Ortahisar's restaurants are Doner Kapab places where they shave off meat from a spit and serve it in sandwiches or on plates with vegetables. A couple of the restaurants have photos of other dishes, but usually only the soup and three or four dishes are available every day, you have to ask!

The pancake being baked on a large black
griddle, with a wood fire underneath. 

A big employer at the moment is the town government. It is in the process of “remodeling” the Hisar, the castle, the landmark rock formation. Most of the homes on the north and west sides are abandoned, by decree I think, and will eventually make up a museum, thus drawing even more tourists who will have been to the other outdoor museums at Zelve and Goreme where all they saw were ruins. This museum will show homes, as they appeared not so long ago, a more modern version of the troglodyte lifestyle.

Meanwhile, foreigners and a few Turks have been buying up cave homes in need of repair, preparing to create yet more cave hotels. I got online to check prices and was surprised to see many such homes for sale in the area, some for as much as 300,000 Euros. That’s a chunk of change for a building that is in dire need of lots more money just to bring it up to living standards, much less the luxury level provided by many of the cave hotels. I may have to come back in a couple of years just to witness all the changes that will have taken place.

Check out the size of those cabbages!

The gauntlet of shops you must walk through in
order to get from the parking lot to the Goreme
open air museum.

The ruins of a large carved church at Goreme.

In the Lands of Armageddon

In the ancient Byzantine churches, Jesus is rarely
shown suffering on the cross, he's most often shown as
a shepherd, a leader, a preacher, or a teacher. 

At the risk of repeating myself, I must say, traveling is an amazing path to get to the essence of what it is to be human. Talking to people in other cultures serves up food for thought, and by traveling slowly, there is time to chew and savor that food. In Turkey I’ve thought about the myriad forms religion takes to satisfy the deep longings of human beings. At the same time, fanaticism, stemming from the fear of not being judged faithful enough to get into heaven, sometimes motivates people to follow advice from the insane.

Recently I had a Face Book interaction with a man who’d left a comment on a friend’s post. I answered him and we got into a discussion, which I’m sure he saw as a combative argument, though I’m always very careful not to call anyone names or say that anyone is wrong.

My friend had asked this man, how, as a Christian, he could support the wars in the Middle East. The man responded that Jesus was not a pacifist, people who think that are wrong. 

His answer made it clear that somehow in his fundamentalist Christianity, the angry penalizing God of the Old Testament that destroyed entire cities at the drop of a hat, and Jesus, are one and the same. Therefore Jesus is not a pacifist. Jesus wants people who “sin” to be punished or die and burn in hell. I pointed out several things Jesus said about turning the other cheek, how he stopped an execution in progress, and told parables about God being a loving father - not the mean S.O.B. of the Old Testament. I always thought Jesus came to change people’s ideas about God, which were fundamentally incorrect. Jesus never advocated violence against our fellow men in anything he said or did. Even when he threw the money-changers out of the temple, he did it mostly with words and some ropes for a whip. Nobody got hurt.

According to that man, I had it all wrong. I mistakenly took those quotes out of context.  Jesus and God are the same entity along with the Holy Spirit, therefore it was Jesus who destroyed Jericho and turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, etc. God is a demanding God, who requires people to do exactly what he says or they will be cast into hell forever. God is still punishing whole countries and cities, using hurricanes and earthquakes to teach people lessons, and he uses powerful nations like the United States to carry out His will.  

After this Face Book interaction, some disjointed ideas cascaded into place.

I grew up in the Bible belt. Not in the “buckle” but definitely in one of the holes. Many times, I was under the impression that people expected the prophecy of Armageddon to happen soon, now that Israel had been reestablished as a country in the Middle East. Because of the belief that Jesus would return and take up the true believers, they actually wanted Armageddon to happen, and in their lifetimes! I remember hoping those people never get to a position of power, they would happily use nuclear bombs to destroy the world. Can you imagine? Billions of people burnt to a crisp based on the belief that Jesus, who advocated non-violence and love, will return to save them (and only them) from their self-full-filled prophecy!

On September 11, 2001, I thought: Oh my god, this is it, the start of Armageddon. 

Although I was against going to war in Afghanistan, I understood why we did it. However, eighteen months later, the war in Iraq was entirely fabricated with lies told about weapons of mass destruction. Even the liberals, who thought the only reason we invaded Iraq was to take over the vast and rich oil fields, may have been incorrect. Iraq is on one side of Iran, and Afghanistan is on the other. With Turkey as an ally, the US now has bases surrounding Iran, a stronghold of the Muslim religion, and greatest enemy of Israel. Back in the Cold War days, when Russia put missiles in Cuba, we considered that an act of aggression.  If our installing bases around Iran isn’t provocation I don’t know what you call it. When President George W. Bush announced he was considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Iraq my stomach clinched. It meant the weapons were already there, only the command needed to be given.

Religion can be a set of shared values, shared moral principles, and a way to keep society from plunging into chaos. It can provide a path for enlightenment to the individual, a path of right-doing so that at the end of this one life, we can look back with some pride in the good we’ve accomplished. On the other hand, when usurped by our natural tribal nature, where we band together into groups of US versus THEM, it can be used to justify heinous scenarios.

I have feared, for a long time, those scenarios. I couldn’t quite fathom how people who claimed to be followers of Jesus could be the perpetrators though, and now I know. Just as the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center believed they would be going to heaven for their deeds (based on twisted ideas from the Koran) so do the people who think God/Jesus is using the global military power of the United States to carry out His grand plan for Armageddon. Their support of the plan, in spite of the death and destruction, proves their faith, just like Abraham who had total faith in God and was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac on God’s orders. The only problem is, God changed his mind at the last minute in that story and provided a ram to use instead for the sacrifice. When nuclear bombs are launched, there is no last minute.

For those of us who see no “God” out there in the universe giving orders, who never hear voices in burning bushes nor “God’s Will” passed to us from prophets, the whole of it appears a nightmare. We need to make sense of it. The realization that many Christians believe “God and Jesus are the same”, that Jesus is not a pacifist but an active participant in the plan to destroy the world by fire as God predicted he would after the great flood, makes sense to me now. The political rhetoric of the last ten years from the Religious Right shines in a brighter light.

I saw glimpses of this irrational thinking growing up in the Texas Panhandle. But then I lived my life for thirty years without giving it much thought until 9-11. Is it too late? Can we still vote it out, excise it from our political spectrum? Can we prevent our military power from creating Armageddon?  If we don’t see it coming, we won’t be fearful enough to try to stop it. That man on Face Book gave me reason to have fear. He was filled with so much misplaced holy passion that if he could, he would personally push the button on the launch sequence. 

Avanos and Ancient Churches

View of Ortahisar from a high point in the Balkan Valley.

Evelien is a walking tour guide. She has clients who come here, mostly from the Netherlands, to hike around in this glorious landscape, which she knows quite well. She finds accommodations for them, plots out routes for them to hike as well as guiding them herself. her website is: Desert Tracks

On Tuesday she needed to go to Avanos so I tagged along and took the bus back. Avanos is a good-sized city, larger than Urgup, which, according to its sign, has almost 30,000 people. The commerce is pottery and weaving, fruit storage (in many caves), plus agriculture and tourism. While there is not much to see in Avanos itself, there are hotels and tour companies based there, and maybe some night life as well. Very nearby is Zelve, an open air museum consisting of town ruins and several wonderful churches carved from the tuff, and Pasabagi with yet more ruins, vast numbers of fairy chimneys, and tourist traps.

I wandered about in Avanos, up a steep hill to a hotel perched high with large views of the river valley. The Mosque is a large one with two minarets, and sits on the banks of the river where a suspension foot bridge sways and bounces gently above the water. On the other side, a large public park with several boat concessions. One features Gondola rides, just like the ones in Italy, but nothing was open on a Tuesday afternoon.

In town there are a few rug and pottery shops. The potteries, where the beautiful dishes are made, are on the outskirts of town. We passed several on the way in. One will let you “paint your own dish”, a sign said in English. The rug shops have woven kilims and densely knotted rugs from Pakistan, Iran, and India. The rugs alone made me want to own a house here and furnish it in tribal colors!

Inside a church in Zelve.

Thursday, after figuring out how the buses run, I returned to Zelve for an afternoon exploration of the cave city and churches. Zelve was built and lived in for several centuries from about 800 to 1200AD. It was finally abandoned because of erosion. In the last 800 years, many of the cliffs containing cave homes have collapsed and subsequently been washed down the canyons. Clearly, in many places just the back wall of the last cave is all that is now exposed to sunlight. Several churches have bits intact, some are only half there, but a couple are in fairly good shape with clear crosses and symbols carved in the ceiling and walls, and a few frescos.

Zelve has a tunnel for about 50 meters through the rock allowing quick access from one valley to the next. It was closed or I would have used the flashlight on my little Turkish cell phone to go through it. Deep in the upper reaches of the third valley, several homes are quite intact, much as they might have been so long ago, with several rooms going deep into the hillside. But across the valley, where the sun is probably brighter, or perhaps it gets more runoff from the hills above, there are great scallops of rock missing, exposing the interior staircases that people once used inside to access upper rooms.

Tuff with sedimentary rock above in Zelve

The geology of this part of Cappadocia is fascinating. For some reason, I had thought the pyroclastic flows were fairly recent, maybe a couple million years old. But in Zelve, the rock that is clearly above the tuff is sedimentary and very thick, indicating that this part at least, was laid down much further back in history, then covered for eons with a lake or sea. The tuff has hunks of basalt embedded in it that were blasted out of the earth with the original pyroclastic flow. Basalt is very hard and difficult to carve, so in places, inside the caves, when a piece of basalt was too large to take out, they simply left it. In one cave there was a grape stomping pit built into the wall with a small hole in the corner for the juice to run out into containers. At the bottom of it there was a large hunk of basalt sticking up which I imagine they stomped around!

Each valley had it’s own wheat grinding stone, driven by donkeys, to serve that village. At the bottom of the three valleys, where their respective streambeds merge, the land flattens out into the river’s flood plain making a rich farmland for these villages. In one church there are paintings of grapes and fish, indicating not only religious connections, but celebrating their primary food sources as well.

Balkan Valley church details

In Ortahisar where I am house-sitting, there is a side canyon called the Balkan Valley that also has some impressive ruins of churches and homes. The first week I was here, I ran into three French people who stiffened up when the dogs approached and then made comments on how they didn’t like nasty filthy dogs. They asked where the churches were and I told them I didn’t think there were any up that valley, which was the truth at the time. Not sure what I’d tell them today…..

The neighbor, Jim, and I hiked into the Balkan Valley and went through all the ruins. One church is nothing more than a small piece of its original self, the rest has caved away and disappeared, but on the ceiling of the alcove are frescos with designs that look almost as fresh as the day they were painted. Other parts of the same church complex are in better shape but there are no frescos to speak of. Some of the carved designs in the walls and ceilings are in great shape. The valley is so isolated and infrequently visited, there’s been very little vandalism or graffiti.

With over 3000 years of continuous human occupation, it’s no wonder these valley walls look like Swiss Cheese. Each little cave, each carved church has a story to tell, but the echos of the stories can barely be heard down the long tunnel of time.

Portions of the village homes in Zelve.

All that is left of an entire church
in the Balkan Valley

Fresco painting on the ceiling in the tiny bit of church
left in the Balkan Valley

Inside the larger church in the Balkan Valley.

Medallions on the walls in Zelve

Nichos inside on of many Zelve churches.

Looking down on Avanos from Zelve

View from deep inside a cave home in Zelve

Large portions of cliff have eroded
leaving the staircase that people once
used inside the home. 

Walk to Urgup

Mt. Erciyes, about 12,800 feet in elevation
seen from Ortahisar in Cappadocia.

The plan for the day was to take one of the little buses that run between Urgup and Ortahisar to the “tourist landing”, a place where the tour buses pull off and hoards of tourists walk over the rocks on both sides of the road. The landing is on a ridge just before the road drops down into Urgup . The view must be spectacular. The  volcano, Mount Erciyes, looms up in the east and valleys spread north and south.

On the way to catch the bus, I saw Jim, the neighbor showing off his new motor scooter to Ali and some of the other men in town. I stopped to chat. When Jim left, Ali drew a map for me, showing me the trail to walk to Urgup. Along the way is a trinity of rock churches; part of an old monastery, very isolated. “Probably no one will be there”, he said. Then gave me a cold bottle of water and sent me on my way.

The road going east on the side of the city government building was paved with small interlocking bricks and made for smooth walking for a while. It led down to a carpet emporium, out by itself in the desert, obviously more of a warehouse for the many shops in town than a tourist draw. The road turned to dirt, then a trail.

Late October, the days can be quite warm, and the shadows cool and pleasant. I had my black sweater which promptly came off and was a pain to carry. Drapped over my shoulder bag, it picked up those chubby little ‘velcro’ stickers everywhere I walked. 

Always the poet, Ali told me that after the carpet store I would find the churches with my heart. Actually, I didn’t have to strain that hard. Off to the left was a large rock outcrop towering into the sky, with well-beaten paths leading up to it. I could  see square holes in the rock. The monastery’s location was hardly a mystery.

I was alone, out in the desert, now two kilometers from town. It was quiet. The churches were cut into the rock, deep rooms four and five meters high, with carved columns. Oddly, the roof wasn’t that fragile. In the largest church one of the four columns had crumbled leaving only portions hanging from the vaulted ceiling.

There were three separate churches sharing “walls” with each other, set into a U shape. On the right was the largest, filled with pigeons that roost in the lip of the round half dome and who have left an impressive ring of guano and feathers on the dirt floor directly under it.  The walls had faint remains of what must have been bright and beautiful frescos painted in the dome and other rounded walls.

The church in the middle had two rows of columns spaced closely together. It was deep, and dark towards the back. A few open windows let in light that filtered down through a thick haze of dust.

Look closely, you can see a man
emerging from the corner.

The church on the left was badly damaged with a giant hole in the roof with no evidence of paint or frescos left. However, it does have a unique little sculpture, totally unexpected and unconnected artistically with anything else, carved into the original rock high up at the corner of two walls. It’s a human figure emerging from the wall joint, left leg extended as if running, the right one missing. In one hand it has a spear, in the other appears the faint outline of a sword. There is no face, just a tilted head, but it gives the impression of a feisty warrior emerging from the rock. At the same time, it’s a bit cartoonish, the body is thick with a large belly, the arms and legs thin. What would possess someone to carve that into the walls of a church? And further, the Muslims didn’t destroy it early on. They abhor the idea of a human figure portrayed in a house of worship, lest someone think you are worshiping a human being rather than God. That is what Christians do, and these were Byzantine churches. But this figure bears no resemblance to Jesus or any other biblical personage. It’s an enigma.

After a thorough and silent exploration of the carved churches, I hiked on over the rocks, down ever-narrowing paths until I could see a short mesa in the distance. A car was parked on the top and there appeared to be a few trees, an orchard, or a garden.

A small Turkish man was working in the garden, planting bushes from pots that he had lined up in the shade of some trees. He spoke a smattering of English and invited me to come over and sit. I sized him up. It’s never a good idea to get chummy with some strange man out in the middle of nowhere. I was cautious but he was smaller than me and I probably outweighed him by forty pounds. I wasn’t worried about him as an individual, it’s just that he might think because I was unsupervised by a man, that I was free for the taking. Although he was given to touching me as he gave me grapes off his vines and asking pointed questions like “Where is your husband?” I didn’t get the impression he would do anything forceful. And he didn’t. He grabbed me and tried to kiss me when I was about to leave, and he didn’t intend it to be a peck on the cheek. I made it clear that I was not interested and marched off across the prickly mesa.

Hoodoos

I could see the “tourist landing” in the distance. It took a while to get to it as I was high up with fairly steep cliffs all round. Circling south, I came across a scattering of broken beer and wine bottles. People don’t get drunk in places that are difficult to get to, so at the edge of the cliff there was a narrow path, almost a staircase, between rock faces. I sure didn’t want to go back to that man’s garden and go down the way I’d come up!

At the tourist landing, a man gives rides on his camel while his wife sells cheap trinkets and his children play together on the rocks behind the shop. Across the road, on the other side is a whole shopping center of little vendors with cold drinks, clothing, and food. Giant tour buses have a wide area to park in and the rocks were drizzled with tourists. I crossed the road to see what must be so wonderful.

To start with, the view is fantastic. Mt. Erciyes rises on the other side of the Urgup valley like a big pointed witch’s hat with snow. Small and large farms take up any flat land between the town and the mountain, and up close there were three enormous fairy chimney’s. In geologic terms they are called hoodoos. (Seriously!)

Formed when a thick hard layer or even a chunk of hard rock is above much softer rock, the hard rock weathers at a slower rate and the softer rock is protected. Around the hard rock the soft rock wears away entirely leaving a tower with the hard piece on top. This part of Cappadocia is littered with formations like these. In places there are entire forests of towers.

In this case, the hard rock is lava on top of the tuff laid down ages ago by eruptions from Mt. Erciyes. The lava came from the later eruptions of less bombastic volcanoes.  The three chimney’s at the tourist landing were tall, thick at the base and very dramatic. Further up the rocks were other interesting formations and differing views. 

Constitution Day in Turkey, Oct. 29

I caught a bus into Urgup and had lunch at a little restaurant that advertised stew in pots, baked in a tandoor oven with bread dough wrapped around to seal the pot. What I got was a passable meal, the pot had no bread around it, and the salad was fresh with just a squeeze of lemon instead of dressing. A basket of bread came with the meal instead.

Monday, October 29^th was Constitution Day, a national holiday to celebrate Turkey’s becoming a Republic. A huge banner with Ataturk’s picture on it hung from the cliff, the red flags of Turkey waved everywhere and patriotic music blasted from the plaza across the street. School children were out in droves, an official band played while the director sang, and dogs snoozed anywhere people wouldn’t step on them.

The bus back to Ortahisar was packed with noisy teenagers taking advantage of the opportunity for accidental full-body contact as we jostled along the road.

Sunlit column in the least intact church.

The emerging man.

Tandir Cafe

Evelien lives about half way down the side of the canyon in Ortahisar. There are two ways to get to the center of town from her house, the fastest, and believe it or not, the easiest way is to go to the bottom and take the staircase to the top on the other side. Or walk uphill to the Hezen Cave Hotel, and take streets from there to the plain above the town, walk around the edge of the canyon and eventually make your way into the center. For sheer exertion the staircase is the way to go. There are no gyms here in Cappadocia, the natural StairMaster is right outside the door.

The Tandir Cafe

Going uphill past Hezen Cave leads to a small park with a few trees, benches and some kid’s play equipment. A couple of small buildings and some tents for tables makes a nice concession stand. When Evelien asked if I’d been to Tandir Café in the park, I thought that’s what she meant. I discovered, walking home from the little grocery, there is another restaurant towards the lower end of the park. You don’t see it easily because it drops off the edge of the cliff down a set of stairs. All that is visible from the park is a wooden fence and a small sign.

Tandir Café is perched on the side of the cliff, the kitchen inside a hunk of rock that looks like a monstrous Hershey’s Kiss.  Below that, down several sets of stairs is the Lavobo, the WC, the restroom. There are rock stairs and pathways leading to tables here and there under café umbrellas, and a large wooden structure with roof and cushions around a low table. The owner is a plump woman with a sweet smiling face who works her buns off serving as well as cooking. More stairs lead further down the cliff to a flat garden area that may or may not be part of the restaurant. There are hidden gardens all over the place, used to grow fruits and vegetables, all are fallow this late in the year.

I ordered kofte, meatballs. I had no idea what the dish would look like, it could come with cream sauce, be just the balls and vegetables, or it could be soupy. Soup also came with it. I saw steam coming from under a vent in the rock and the lady showed me her Tandoor oven, hence the name of the café. She said she’s not cooking anything more today, the fire was going out already.

I chose the highest table not wanting to lug my groceries all the way down the hill and back up, since I still had quite a walk back to Evelien’s house. She brought up a large tray laden with small dishes and put them out in a neat order along with a plate and basket of fluffy white bread.  The dishes contained olive oil, some kind of dipping spice powder, cooked mild peppers in vinegar, crumbled cheese with herbs, and a dish of strong dill and garlic pickled vegetables. “Enjoy your meal” she said, and went back downhill to the kitchen.

Sometimes I am so clueless, I don’t even know I’m clueless. This was the meal? Surely not. This is just the start. Right? What was it that I ordered? I forgot after we chatted about the tandoor oven. But she never came back. I ate a piece of bread dipped in oil and powder, ate a few of the pickles, and enjoyed the crumbly cheese, took some photos of the view, washed my hands in the restroom, and eventually she came back with the soup. “Enjoy your meal” she said again.

Oh my. It was well worth the wait. Hard to find words to describe a good lentil soup. The spices, onion, garlic, the lentils, the broth, all blend so seamlessly there is only a new wonderfully complex flavor such that no single ingredient stands out. It was nirvana soup.

Open door to the WC, above is the kitchen

Slowly sipping and loving the soup, I finished and waited. More bread, a good sop of the bowl, a pickle or two, then she trudged up the hill with another large bowl, the kofte. Not like any I’ve ever had. The meatballs were perfectly round, the size of marbles, if that big, rolling around in a broth that used tomato for coloring, spices so subtle as to be indistinguishable, producing in concert a flavor I’ve never tasted before. Plenty of olive oil floated about in little red ponds between the mottled brown balls of beef and lamb with specs of rice and parsley. Nirvana kofte with a view, on a smooth autumn day when the sun was hot and the shade chilled.

I staggered home with my groceries, too full, ready for a nap, knowing the beasts would be waiting anxiously after 4 hours for their afternoon walk.  A little slice of heaven experienced, then, wham! Back to the real world.

  

Mormons and Muslims

Traveling around in Turkey, I am reminded of Utah, by much more than just the terrain. Utah was settled almost entirely by Mormons and only Salt Lake City and Park City seem to have a percentage of non-Mormons above the 1-digit range.

Turkey is largely Muslim with few other religions. In 1923, by treaty, the Christians were resettled in Greece and the Muslims there had to come to Turkey or move elsewhere. The ancient Byzantine Christian churches are now museums and highly touted, but there are only a handful of actual Christians in most towns. The Mosques dominate the landscape with their tall heaven-ward minarets and the sound-scape at least five times a day with the call to prayers. In Mormon country, every small town has as least one Mormon ward, with it's sharp pointed spire heaven-bound.

Muslim women's class on the Koran

Both religions value family highly and encourage, maybe even require through social pressures, that families have many children. The average Muslim family has 5 with some having as many as 10 children. The Mormons may top that.

In the more conservative Muslim groups, women are kept under wraps with layers of material over body, arms, legs, head and sometimes face. In the Mormon culture, women always wear dresses to church and much of the time otherwise, with emphasis on modesty. In the more conservative areas women are required to wear old fashioned dresses with long skirts, long sleeves and buttoned up to the neck blouses. Some even wear bonnets when outside. In both cultures women tend to stay home, have and raise children, tend house, and be good wives. Their social lives revolve around other women and children.

In the state of Utah it's impossible to find politics separated from religion, though once in a while someone will pretend it's so. Ditto for Turkey which prides itself on being secular, yet has in power now a President from a religious coalition party who recently jailed a very famous pianist for making a joke on Twitter about Islam.

The Mormon religion and Islam both prohibit the consumption of alcohol and smoking cigarettes. The Mormons are way more successful in enforcing those rules than the Muslims in Turkey. Muslims do better at it in other countries.

The small towns look so similar in both areas. Surrounding the towns are agricultural areas, farms, wood processing operations, mines.  The houses are large to accommodate the large (sometimes extended) families, the religious center is the main focus of the social life and dominates the town in size and position. People speak to each other in religious terms with trained phrases for only insiders know the deeper meanings. Both groups have a long history of reading their religious books regularly, to the point where many people have whole chapters memorized. Both groups spend a lot of time talking about and exploring the religious meaning and interpretations of their respective books and the works of their religious thinkers.

Utah has Bryce Canyon and Turkey has Cappadocia. Weird strange landscapes that are massive tourism generators.

Bryce Canyon, Utah

Cappadocia, Turkey

Kurban Bayrami - Feast of the Sacrifice

The woman I am house sitting for, Evelien, is a vegetarian, and she really doesn't like this Feast of the Sacrifice, where sheep are ritually killed with bloodletting. She warned me to keep the dogs away from all the blood in the streets, the innards and other offal from the butchering. I was under the impression the streets would be flowing red today with screaming animals, shouting people, smokey fires and boiling vats of water which usually accompany a butchering operation. But aside from the plaintive bleating of a single sheep, chained to a stone wall, I wouldn't have known it was a day different from any other.

Because it's a national holiday, people are off work. A number of cars are parked around in places where there are usually none. Some of the men took the opportunity to give their cars deferred maintenance, like tire rotations and an oil change. More people are wandering the narrow streets, the hotels seem full and the town center was bustling with tourist busses, though few stores and no banks were open this afternoon. The air this morning was filled with a smoky smell, but that could be from wood fires, it was quite chilly last night. The smoke smelled a bit of coal, still used here to heat homes. The trash bins were very full, actually overflowing, so the dogs had a heyday rooting around the dumpsters until I caught them and forced them to come with me on our walk. Even in the dumpsters there was no sign of a bloody orgy, it was mostly vegetable peelings, chicken bones, and bakery containers. 

Last night, at David's dinner, I had some interesting conversations with the other guests about the rituals of Kurban Bayrami. One, a New Zealander named Ruth, has been in Turkey for decades. She was married to a Turk and has a number of Turkish relatives who keep tabs on her. She is co-owner, with her brother-in-law, of a Turkish rug shop in Goreme the most famous town in Cappadocia. When they opened the shop, she didn't want to do the traditional "cutting", a sheep sacrifice in which the sheep's blood is allowed to run into the shop in order for it to become prosperous. At first, they had a few customers but no one was buying. She finally relented to family pressure to allow the sacrifice. As the sheep lay on the threshold bleeding to death, a European couple came up. She explained the sheep thing and the couple went inside to spend over 10,000 Euros on rugs during the next couple of hours. From then on, the shop has done very well, and is one of the most respected because Ruth is straightforward, unlike so many dealers who schmooze and charm, but don't always tell the real story about a rug. Since that first cutting, she has participated in many of these ritual sacrifices.

Ruth made an interesting observation. She said she's never attended a sacrifice without crying about it, but looking that sheep in the eye makes you connected to your food in ways most of us never experience, and you appreciate what the animal has to endure for your benefit. Most of us just eat meat,  taking its existence for granted, never giving a thought to the life that ended. 

Kurban Bayrami is a religious holiday and the ritual blood-letting is something that goes back to biblical times. I don't know how long people have been repeating the sacrifice of a ram caught in the brambles (provided by God) so Abraham would not have to sacrifice his own son. But as with many religious celebrations, for some people, it's taken on a life of it's own without a solid connection to its past. 

In Istanbul, I had a traveling partner for the day. Waifa was from Morocco. At 23 she'd never been inside a mosque until we went into the Blue Mosque. Yet, she told me she needed to return home before the end of October to celebrate Kurban Bayrami with her family. Her father had already purchased the sheep they would sacrifice for the celebration. Neither of her parents practiced as Muslims nor had they brought up their children in any religious way. Kurban Bayrami for them must be like Christmas for Atheists who use it as the excuse to play Santa and eat fudge. 

The food at David's was excellent, and it wasn't lamb or sheep! He's a marvelous, relaxed cook. When Jim and I arrived, he was still in his running clothes and needed Jim to peel the potatoes. He popped two fat chickens into the oven on high heat with garlic, slices of orange and lots of olive oil. After they cooked a while, he basted them with white wine and added dates. The sauce from all that was heavenly, as were the garlic mashed potatoes. Those two dishes and several bottles of wine was dinner. Then for dessert: fresh ripe almost mushy persimmons and coconut balls with brandy cream which one of the other guests brought. The conversations were interesting, all of the guests were single people living in Turkey or traveling around. Only one was a Turk and she runs the Hezen Cave Hotel. She will be arranging for me to go on one of the early morning hot air balloon rides. Jim says David is amazing, that he can actually land the balloon basket onto the flat bed of the truck that takes it away.
I definitely want to ride with him!

As for the man with his flock of sheep, we saw him out this afternoon on our walk, minus three sheep. Each one had a yellow ear tag and a number painted on it's back, so I suspect it's only a matter of time for the remaining four. Kurban Bayrami isn't over until Saturday night.