Göreme Part 3: Spirit

In high school and college, I generally selected what I considered to be the more off-beat history classes:  Communist Societies, Latin American History, Environmental History of the US, African History, Art History, etc. etc.  Now, here in Turkey, I am a bit of a blank slate when it comes to the history of Western Civilization.  I envy those Georgetown students (and Bryan) up on the rocky promontory in the Ottoman-era digs of the McGhee Center with their intense reading schedules and cozy academic seminars delving into Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Turkish studies.  My education down here with the commoners in Oba has progressed at a slower pace, with bits of reading tucked between multiplying monomials with Booker and submitting grant applications for HIP. 

But the moment I leave the confines of Oba, with its bad t-shirt shops, aggressive restaurant customer-rustlers and hideous tattoo parlors, I literally step into history.  And Bryan patiently indulges my curiosity by recounting stories behind the ancient ruins upon which we tread (sometimes not so lightly).

Göreme’s landscape was filled with spirits of the past.  Every morning and afternoon during our three-day stay there, we walked 10 minutes down the street from our hotel and turned into various paths winding through the dusty dry mountains and valleys, into which were carved colonies upon colonies of cave dwellings.  Some cave dwellings were stacked on top of others inside one tall precarious mountain, like an ancient rock-hewn favela.  

On our first afternoon hiking about the crumbling cliffs, Bryan found a cave entrance with a locked gate protecting the frescoes of what was once a church.  The iPhone picture made by sticking my hand through the gate captured more details of the church interior than I was able to see in the dim light.  Are those dandilions springing out of the cross??

The soft rock of the Cappadocia region, formed from layers of volcanic ash and lava, made it easy for settlers to tunnel out cave homes in the early part of the first millennium.  The rock is so soft to the touch, in fact, that it’s surprising that the honeycomb of caves and towering fairy chimneys are still standing.  Göreme has been declared UNESCO site, thank goodness, but as I was wandering through the circuit of cave dwellings, I thought that UNESCO won’t be able protect this magical landscape from the ravages of wind and water.  Currently not much is done to protect it from the human element either.  Aside from the walled off Open Air Museum, the landscape around Göreme is wide open for anyone to wander through, including plenty of tourists on ATVs.  An ATV, I can say with absolute confidence, is a vastly inferior means of exploring the awesome ridges and valleys of Cappadocia.  Really people, just walk, for god’s sake.  In any case, Cappadocia’s carved out wonders have lasted for 2,000 years, so let’s hope they have another good 2,000 years of life before getting worn down to a nub by some weather event or ATV hot-rodder.

Back to the walled off Open Air Museum.  We bought our tickets to this elaborate monastic village at around 9am, before the tourist buses arrived to unload their hordes.  I learned that St. Basil was the inspiration for this cluster of cave monasteries.  He was born into a large well-respected Cappadocia family in the 4^th century, and as part of his religious studies he travelled to Egypt, Syria and Palestine where he studied with Christian ascetics.  He returned to Cappadocia, gave away his possessions and set about establishing a monastery with his old friend Gregory the Theologian.  St. Basil’s religious community was defined by a cenobitic or communal lifestyle, but also welcomed hermetic monks.  Some of these hermits would carve themselves a cave hut and remain inside meditating for the rest of their lives, only receiving food and providing religious counsel through the door.  St. Basil’s idea of a monastic village lived on in Göreme, and in the 10^th, 11^th and 12^th centuries Christians continued to carve into existence an even larger network of cave churches, refectories and very ascetic monastic sleeping quarters, all of which we wandered through in the open air museum.

 This was one church tour that elicited not one complaint from Booker and Seamus, as they raced up cave stairs and ran through cave tunnels.  Yep, no question, these boys were diggin’ it.