Turkey boasts an extraordinary array of different landscapes, from the Mediterranean coast to the mountainous interior, from parched brown planes, to the damp mountains of the northeast, enveloped in mist and carpeted with wild flowers. Among the most spectacular is the otherworldly landscape of Cappadocia, with its fairy chimneys, caused by the continual erosion of the soft, volcanic tuff rock, soaring up into the sky. With its lush, verdant valleys carving through the brown moonscape surface, Cappadocia is one of the most magical places.
Humans have also played their part in shaping the landscape. For Cappadocia is another of those regions of Turkey where the ghostly remnants of past civilisations, of people who are no longer there, are all around, images of a world that is no more. Wandering around the valleys that crisscross the hilly terrain, one repeatedly comes across little chapels carved into the rock, and occasionally substantial churches with vaulted ceilings and arches. There are hundreds of them, dating back a thousand years and more. Some are in poor condition now, the continual erosion gouging out gaping holes in their ceilings. Or else they have been damaged by later occupiers of this land who have adapted them for other uses, often as pigeon coops. Altars and little niches have been shaped out of the soft stone. In many, painted designs are still visible, often simple, primitive, drawn on to the bare rock. But others are much more sophisticated, with intricate, vivid frescoes painted by the masters of their day.
The most splendid of these rock churches are now properly looked after, and visitors must pay to enter. The Göreme Open Air Museum is a monastery complex including numerous little chapels, the finest of which are very fine indeed. Their original names are frequently unknown, and the names by which they are identified today are often taken from prominent frescoes inside. Most impressive of all is the 11th century Dark Church, so-called because there is only one very small window, letting little natural light inside, which helped to preserve the frescoes. After centuries as a pigeon coop, the bird droppings were scraped away to reveal the best preserved frescoes in all Cappadocia.
In a forerunner of the high-rise dwellings of the 20th centuries, Cappadocia’s residents hollowed out the towering rocks for their dwellings. Holes in the rocks reveal the windows and doors that once led into peoples’ homes. In Göreme some of these rock houses are still in use, wooden doors and glass windows fitted into the entrances. Some hotels have cave rooms. Most spectacular are the huge rocks that once contained whole communities, living in warrens of tunnels and cave dwellings. The immense rock of Üçhisar, not far from Göreme, dominates the landscape for miles around, giving me a bearing on my hikes. The tunnels and caves of the rock itself have now been abandoned, the population living in houses clustered around its base. Similar great rock villages are found at Çavuşin and Ortahisar, also abandoned.
Troglodyte inhabitants of the past also built vast underground towns, elaborate mazes of narrow tunnels and chambers, sometimes opening out into broad, high caverns, here a church, there a schoolroom, a winery, stables. I visited the underground city of Derinkuyu, creeping along the passageways, hunching over at times in order to fit through the narrow passages. In some places great circular doors stand to the side of the tunnel that in times gone by could have been rolled across to seal off different levels from each other, for defence.
At ground level in Derinkuyu there stands a great Christian basilica, a remnant of more recent Christian inhabitants who only left Cappadocia less than a century ago. By the 12th century, Cappadocia had come under the rule of the Seljuk Turks, and after them the Ottomans. Over subsequent centuries, many of the Christians of Cappadocia adopted the Turkish language, written in the Greek alphabet. Others who continued to speak Greek spoke a dialect heavily influenced by Turkish, known as Cappadocian Greek. As part of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, Cappadocia’s Christians had to leave their ancestral home and settle in Greece. The newly arrived settlers quickly adopted the modern Greek language, but some third-generation descendants of those original settlers continue to speak Cappadocian Greek in a number of places in Greece.
Bruce Clark writes in his fascinating book Twice a Stranger, about the population exchange, how things very nearly turned out differently for the Cappadocian Christians. In September 1922, a congress was held in Kayseri, in Cappadocia, of a new, self-proclaimed Turkish Orthodox Church. Its main advocate was a pro-Turkish Orthodox priest known as Papa Eftim. His ambition seems to have been to supplant the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople. For some in the Turkish government, the idea of a distinct Turkish Christian community, speaking Turkish and loyal to Turkey, and with its own Turkish Church hierarchy, had some appeal. Had it come about, it might have given greater substance to the idea of Turkey as a modern secular state, in which different religions could coexist. Turkey might have been a different kind of state. And the Cappadocians might have been able to stay in their homes, as most would almost certainly have preferred, having been largely spared the horrors of war that many other Greek communities in Anatolia had suffered. But it was not to be. In the end, there was not enough support at the Lausanne Peace Conference for leaving the Cappadocian Christians be, and so they were packed off to Greece along with the rest.
Bruce Clark writes how attachment to the old homeland remains especially strong among the Greeks of Cappadocian origin, and that nowhere else in Turkey are Greek visitors as welcomed by Turks, especially if they are of Cappadocian stock. It is a uniquely beautiful land, and the Christians who lived there for nearly two millennia left a powerful imprint. Today, Muslim Turkish guides show around nominally Christian European visitors, explaining to them the significance of the icons, the theology, the Orthodox Christian belief system. Today, after long neglect, the ancient churches are cared for, the cultural heritage of the people who are no longer there valued and preserved. That is cause for hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment