Our primitive ancestors settled in caves, because they still could not build houses. Many people in Cappadocia even today prefer tuff arches to the walls of modern apartments. “Around the World” went to Turkey to find out what is good in such a life.
Grandma Arife loves guests and is ready to pose in front of the camera. And grandfather Mustafa grumbles that decent women do not allow tourists to photograph their faces. From the cliff to the entrance to their cave descends a steep path trodden in stone. A small courtyard on the site in front of the cliff is cleanly swept and fenced with vines, a satellite dish is attached in the corner. Arif and Mustafa are troglodytes, inhabitants of caves.
Cave with view
You cannot enter a traditional Cappadocian cave without a bow: a very low doorway. Previously, such passages served as additional protection against uninvited guests. Many caves in the Göreme Valley were dug by people as early as the 4th century: in such dwellings, early Christians hid from persecution. It was difficult for tall Roman soldiers in full military clothing to penetrate the narrow labyrinths.
Mustafa got a three-room cave after the death of his father: the fourth generation of the family lives on this piece of land obtained during the Ataturk era.
“Touch the walls,” said Mustafa, 77, “they save lives.” At home, even bread and grapes do not spoil for weeks, to say nothing of me. – He punches himself in the chest and laughs.
It was no coincidence that the first settlers liked the local rocks made of volcanic tuff: it is so easy to process the rock that only a pick and a shovel are enough to create a living space. In this case, malleable tuff hardens in the air and soon after completion of work ceases to crumble. But its main advantage is the natural climate control: in the summer in such caves it is cool, and in the winter warm.
“When we were young, we lived in modern houses, but we didn’t like it, they moved a lot,” says grandmother Arif. – It’s cold, sometimes stuffy, now little space, then expensive. And here we arrived, it was just right. I rarely go out of the cave unless in the bazaar once a week.
Being in her house, you won’t think that you are in a cave: carpets hang on the whitewashed walls, wicker napkins are laid out on cabinets and bedside tables, and a knitted blanket is spread out on the sofa. Canaries in the cells shout over the speaker from the TV, double-glazed windows are inserted into the windows.
“Nothing has changed here since the time of my father,” Mustafa says. “We only whitewashed the walls, updated the windows and the threshold.” And we had water supply and electricity thirty years ago, right from the city. Such a house does not require repair.
The cave of the old people is traditionally divided into male and female halves: in the male room there is a TV and a stove, but the female window overlooks the Göreme Valley, over which balloons fly in the mornings. A separate entrance leads to the courtyard – Alu, where a woman can do household chores, hidden from prying eyes. Here Arif has her own garden. Even in winter, feathers of green onions break through the gray stony soil.
“This land is as if ours and as if it were state,” says Arif. “We own it, we can leave it to our grandchildren, but we must pay the rent to the government.” Rent is small, because this cave is not a historical monument. But if we wanted to sell our rights to it, we could buy an apartment in Istanbul with a view of the Bosphorus.
– Would you like to live in Istanbul? – I ask the grandmother.
“No,” she laughs, “it is noisy and there are no caves.”
While I choose a souvenir doll from those that Arif makes for sale, my grandmother shows me the embroidered headdress that she wore before the wedding more than fifty years ago. And he asks her to take a picture until he sees Grandfather Mustafa.
“I would like to be just as beautiful when I get old,” I say to Arif.
“That’s because I live in a cave,” my grandmother answers. “We are all handsome and long-lived here.”
Cave with traditions
“Live longer, live better, in my house, a sweet cave.” The scan of the New York Times publication of May 2, 1997 with such a heading was glued with adhesive tape to the wall of the cave, hollowed out in a tuff column near the Uchisar fortress. Ismail Kutlugun, the owner of this cone-shaped natural formation, of which there are many, smiles from the photo. They are called “fairies chimneys” – peribajalars (peribacaları) .
I didn’t find Ismail’s cave right away; the locals showed the way. Here, many do not have postal addresses: postmen know each cave settler by sight, therefore it is enough to indicate the valley and the name of the recipient on envelopes and parcels.
Ismail sits in the living room, his wife Imine pours tea into glass cups, Armuda.
– Do you see niches in the walls where old dishes are placed? These are pigeon roosts, says Ismail. – Once upon a time there was an old Christian monastery, and in these caves its inhabitants kept pigeons: bird droppings were used as fertilizer. The monks grew grapes and made wine. But it was a long time ago, even before the Ottoman Empire. And when they were driven out, the caves were occupied by the Turks. I have never lived elsewhere. I was born in this cave, and I will die in it.
Ismail is the eldest of two brothers in the family, so he always knew that he would get the tuff house. There are eight floors in its peribajalar: the higher you climb, the smaller the room.
“Look, there used to be people here in every cave,” Ismail, standing with me on the balcony of the second floor, points to a forest of tuff cones that look like giant termite mounds. – The whole village was. There’s the Imine family home. She is also the daughter of troglodytes, we have been growing together since childhood. When I was little, the cave dwellers still kept chickens, goats and even cows: the lower floor was used for a stable. And then, in the 1980s, authorities announced a general resettlement. Many were given apartments in Nevsehir. And my cave was the strongest, only I was allowed to stay, but cattle were forbidden to keep. Now Imine and I are alone.
I go through the courtyard behind Ismail to another rock, look at the winter apartments – the former monastery wineries. They have smaller rooms and the corridors go deeper into the rock. In the kitchen floor, concurrently with the main room in the house, a hearth has been hollowed out, looking like a huge bowl with a narrow neck. When food is prepared here, the whole cave is also warming up. True, Ismail has not used these apartments for a long time: in the cold season, he simply drafts metal stoves in the summer rooms with coal and firewood.
– My distant ancestors were nomads. Then one scientist from Ankara came and said that the tradition of dividing houses into summer and winter is also an echo of nomadic life. Like seasonal pastures. Or do you see such a specially made dent in the center of the ceiling? This is gobek, “navel” in our opinion, so it happens in tents. Only I tell him: I am not a nomad, here is my story. If you run away from your story, there will be nothing to pass on to the children.
– And are young people ready to live in caves? – I ask.
“No,” Ismail sighs, “because young people need universities, offices and clubs.” All this is only in big cities. And in our valleys, in addition to history, there is already nothing, so they are leaving. One hope for tourists: young Turks take over everything from foreigners, and they can infect them with a fashion for cave life. I like to look at foreign guests when they first enter my house, sneakily touch the walls, sniff the air and glance cautiously at the ceiling: no matter how it collapses. Exactly the same way I behave in a modern apartment. Funny, I guess. I often suggest travelers spend the night at home, enjoy the exotic. Only this is all unofficial: I don’t have money for the certificates necessary to open the hotel.
Cave with tourists
Hakan Bay, the owner of the Wings Hotel , has been saving for special permits for cave reconstruction for twenty-five years. For more than twenty years, he worked as a manager in the best hotels in Istanbul, saved money and finally managed to buy out for his hotel a building built over historic caves in Nevsehir.
“Most of the money went into repairing the cave rooms,” says Hakan. – I had to get a lot of permissions. You can’t even nail a nail in Cappadocia’s caves without reference, and we had to not only expand the rooms for the convenience of our guests, but also place hammams and decorate the walls with bas-reliefs.
After UNESCO included the Göreme National Park and other cave settlements in Cappadocia in 1985 as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO’s familiar habitats turned into historical monuments. With all the rules of use attached to them: according to Turkish law, for damage to historical monuments you can get from two to five years in prison.
– The law applies even to those who live in caves from generation to generation. At first, the ban was not taken seriously, but in 1992 the government made it clear that it was not joking: then shepherds were sent to prison for two years, who hollowed out their own sleeping niches in one of the caves in the Goreme valley. They were illiterate, did not know that they spoil the historical value. After this incident, the inhabitants of Cappadocia began to be very careful about their caves.
If the cave owner wants to change something in his home, the first thing he needs to do is get a certificate that the cave is not a historical monument. The reconstruction plan is approved by the state architect. Each stage of construction requires a separate permit. A special commission monitors the progress of work and may come with inspections for several years. And if one of the local residents informs the police about changes in the appearance of the cave, then this is an occasion for arrival and verification of all documents. But bureaucratic difficulties do not stop those who want to “build” their business in caves.
“Architecturally, Cappadocia is a unique place,” says Hakan. – Look how our natural formations are similar to the creations of the Catalan Antonio Gaudi. He was inspired by this place, like the French architect Le Corbusier.
Every year the number of cave hotels in Cappadocia is growing. Former stables, dovecots, warehouses and wine cellars are becoming rooms of expensive hotels. But the real troglodytes remain less.
“Old people die,” continues Hakan, “the caves are inherited by the young.” And the children are not ready to create home comfort with their own hands, because you can’t buy typical furniture in a cave. Plus, all these carpets, paths, bedspreads … Factory products look ridiculous in the cave, and almost no one owns the skill of our grandmothers. Here are young and sell their inheritance to hotels or foreigners. And these foreigners then tell us what we are losing.
The guide Cesar told me the same thing when we drove past a whole area of the once inhabited, but now abandoned caves – with black dips of empty windows, with broken balconies:
– Recently, ethnographers from Italy came to Cappadocia. They told at the school of guides how important it is to study the life of people who have lived in caves for generations. And I remembered that five years ago we had a couple of old people in our neighbors – I even took tourists to them once. Everyone was going to ask them about how they live now and how they lived before, but there was no time. And now the old people have died: first he, then she. Grandchildren came, took things, in the rock of the one opened a souvenir pottery shop.
Treasure cave
One of the most popular places in Avanos is the Shaban Topuz shop, whose seven generations of ancestors were engaged in pottery. In the basement caves of his workshop, as in the treasury of Aladdin: a labyrinth of rooms, where each is filled with amazing jugs, plates and pots.
“Once in Cappadocia it was impossible to marry if you do not know how to work with clay,” says Shaban, spinning a potter’s wheel. – The matchmaking went like this: first, the groom’s parents went to the bride’s house and watched what kind of rugs she weaves. Then the bride’s parents went to the groom’s house and asked him to mold a sugar bowl for them. And this is one of the most difficult jobs!
Shaban takes a piece of clay and turns it into a graceful pot with clever finger movements.
– First, the base is made, and then the lid. Test for the master: the lid should fit right away, without trying on. But this is not the main thing – Shaban takes a freshly molded sugar bowl with a perfectly fitted lid and with one movement of a knife cuts the product in half. – The main thing is that the walls of the sugar bowl are everywhere the same thickness. And if the parents are not satisfied with the work of the groom, they will refuse to marry him.
In the caves of Shaban there is enough space for an exhibition of ceramics, and for furnaces, and for the working area, where men create dishes on pottery circles. The burned blanks are already painted by women, but they do it at home, in underground rooms. In Avanos, most of the buildings are erected over caves. Nobody lives in them for a long time, but they use the premises for warehouses, shops or workshops.
“The tourist popularity of Cappadocia, on the one hand, helped the caves, on the other, played a cruel joke with them,” says Shaban. – Yes, many ancient murals have been preserved in this way. But no one counts the caves that this hype destroys. They built a road for tourist buses to the underground city-museum of Derinkuyu, and it passes exactly above the caves. And every day a historical monument is subjected to a huge load, the walls crack and crumble. Some areas are completely settled to preserve them. Only here is the misfortune: go through the city – you will see empty towers, full of holes like Swiss cheese. In tuff caves, high humidity, and this contributes to erosion. While people lived there, they heated their houses, laid carpets and thereby protected the walls from destruction.
Shaban is proud of his caves, although he did not inherit them. Ten years ago, the potter bought the cellars from several Turkish families, combined them into one gallery-maze, he himself carved niches and cupboards in the walls.
“One old potter revealed a secret to me,” Shaban smiles slyly. – The one who owns the cave, owns happiness. He had just learned this secret when he lost his “fairy chimney” and moved to a new, modern house.
Old people who were forced to relocate call such buildings disaster homes – afet evleri. This is because visiting architects planned and built the houses. Life in them is more expensive than in cave settlements. In winter, the apartments are not warm enough: you need to spend money on central heating. It’s stuffy in summer: you have to start air conditioning, and this is a new expense. In former times, cabinets and shelves were hollowed out directly in the wall of the cave, and in new dwellings it is necessary to put furniture that takes up extra space.
“Young people now have depression or stress,” says Shaban, “they have lost their place and do not even know what to look for.” They are poor, in apartment buildings. I was lucky: I realized this on time. Working with your hands and living in caves is the key to happy longevity. And if any person can always arrange the first for himself, then the second is only with us, in Cappadocia.
