No Picnic at Hanging Rock by David Clement Davies

It glinted in the Cappadocian moonlight; the last symbol in an impossibly symbolic landscape. Perched on top of the ancient rock cone in Goreme village like a metallic pigeon was their very own disco ball. Cappadocia’s famous ‘fairy-chimneys’ loomed around me through the snow, scoured out of the rock by time, the elements and man; phallic wendy houses riddled with windows and passageways, up-turned ice-cream cones masquerading as ancient churches. These valleys are a vast swiss cheese. Above ground, thousands of the weird lunar connicles sit on top of ten underground cities. They have been marked by, to name a few, Hittite, Roman, Christian, Seljuk and Ottoman civilisations. And now this twentieth century addition to millennia of iconography.

The mayor bought the ball and stuck it on top. With it came dreams of a disco. Goreme has a new one and a lot else besides; a new bus station, a largish concrete shopping mall and a bristling array of hotels bearing vaguely 60s mottos like ‘The Troglodyte’ and ‘The Flinstones’. In ten years tourism has transformed the place. A million of us go through every year to explore the chimneys and subterranean citadels, where ancient inhabitants squirreled themselves away for months, rolling millstones across the flues to the escape the endemic violence that swept across the Anatolian plain.

In the Anthills of Anatolia the new termite invasion brings benefits and problems, but there is at least a policy of conservation in Cappadocia. In 1985 Goreme and the surrounding valleys were protected as a National Park and put on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. UNESCO has already done some restoration in the valleys and it is no longer possible to build higher than the fairy chimneys. But what there is still seems haphazard and at the potential mercy of whim and corruption. The top storey of a hotel was only removed when the owner lost his seat in parliament. There are those who also believe that little of the money collected in the valleys’ Open Air Museums finds its way back into conservation.

As I walked up to Goreme’s own museum, where a few of the most beautiful churches have been sectioned off for tourists, the first coach of the morning was snorting through the snow. Hanging in the rocks above me I started to spy painted faces and the remnants of frescoes, ancient eyes peering out of eroded cubby holes, disembodied hands and fingers clinging to the rock. At sunset this moonscape quivers from apricot pink to burning violet.

In the ‘Dark’ Church there was an explosion of colour as the guide, wheezing with emphacema, pointed out the iconography; Christ the Pantocrator, Christ on The Cross, Judas, and below them all, eight kneeling figures lifting jewels to heaven . “Capitalista” said the guide, nodding happily. The revelation struck home. These had been the donors for the original painting in the 11th and 12th Centuries. Eight Cappadoccian Capitalists.

“That’s not restoration,” snorted a passing guide, “it’s a new church. If they want a new church why don’t paint another cave over there and leave it alone?”

To my eyes the work here and in the wonderful Tokali church has relit the past, but in Europe such massive ‘restoration’ would cause a civil war among archaeologists. But then with an average schooling of five years and infinitely more pressing problems, it is hard to imagine Turkey concerning itself much.

“In Turkey no one really cares,” nodded the guide, tired and unshaven from a thirteen day marathon coach tour from Istanbul.

We all squeezed into another little sanctuary and a heavily restored American lady in a plastic rain hat nudged her hubby in the ribs significantly, as we goggled up at the original pigment, still vivid from the centuries but badly chipped from earlier invasions. The graffiti threaded back into a past of expropriation. 1856. 1745. Outside a beehive hairdo was competing with the clicking cacophony of twenty Japanese cameras.

“Did you get a photo of that sign, honey?” came the southern drawl, “Let’s gets some pictures of ourselves before we go.”

Across the valley, where the entrances to a myriad caves were toothed with icicles, there were still few footprints in the snow and I half expected a monkish face to pop out at any moment and tell us all to bugger off .

But then tourism’s movable culture brings folk to Cappadocia for any number of reasons. Few are as purest as conservationists might like. On a distant clifftop Nuri, our whistlestop guide for the day, pointed proudly to the spot where they shot the Sand People sequence in Star Wars. We stopped for lunch in the ravishing Ihlara gorge where a ribbon of blue green river snakes for sixteen kilometres through a staggering landscape of lush greenery and brooding rock walls, honeycombed with houses and churches. But the conversation among the young travellers had moved on; to interest rates, economics and jobs back home.

Meanwhile the guests at the improbably named Mediterranean Pension, marooned in Uchisar’s looming rock castle opposite the Valley of the Pigeons, certainly knew why they were here. They were young too and delighting in it all. Turkey is still remarkably cheap and Cappadocia a must on the backpacker’s trail. In summer the numinous valleys have a mystery all their own. When summer turns it into a fruit bowl and the cones in the Valley of the Lovers seem to swell to even more priapic proportions in the heat, the landscape can take on a symbolism that would make a monk blush.