Day 6: Squash, Snakes, and the Return of the Sardine Can
After breakfast, we said goodbye to the Eyes of Cappadocia and headed out for another jam-packed day before our evening flight to Istanbul. Oğuzhan apparently considered an unused minute a personal failure.
As we left, more than 100 balloons floated overhead. It was another spectacular sight, made especially enjoyable by the fact that we had gotten some sleep, already eaten breakfast and were standing on something permanently attached to the ground. Also, the weather yesterday was much better.
We drove south from Nevşehir into agricultural country, where potatoes, squash, and vineyards featured prominently. Cappadocia is particularly known for white wines made from the local Emir grape. The vines grow in volcanic soils, and chambers carved into the rock serve as wine cellars. The landscape provides both the scenery and somewhere to keep the drinks—a thoughtful arrangement.
Our first stop was Mustafapaşa, where we sampled everyday village life by sitting at an outdoor café drinking Turkish coffee. This is the sort of cultural immersion I can support enthusiastically.
That wealth helped pay for stone mansions, carved doorways, balconies, and elaborate interiors. Some houses contain murals of landscapes, figures, and mythological scenes. A plain wall was apparently a missed opportunity.
There is also a sobering history behind these beautiful buildings. During the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1924, the village’s Greek Orthodox families left for Greece, while Muslim families from Greece were resettled here. The surviving houses and churches preserve traces of a community whose people were forced to leave their homes and begin again elsewhere.
We continued about ten miles farther south to the farming village of Taşkınpaşa, where potatoes and squash are major crops.
Squash seemed to grow everywhere.
Here, it is cultivated for the seeds, which are removed, dried in the sun, and eaten as snacks throughout Turkey—roughly the role peanuts play at home. The rest goes to the animals.
From a commercial standpoint, the squash itself is essentially elaborate packaging.
Jeri and Molly found it painful to see all that squash headed for livestock. They saw a terrible waste of potential meals. The animals, presumably, were thrilled.
Potatoes are also big business here. Just outside town, enormous warehouses have been carved into the rock to store them, taking advantage of the naturally stable conditions underground. We slipped inside one that was open and found ourselves in a cavernous space.
The potatoes were enjoying accommodations substantially more spacious than ours in Istanbul.
By then, it was time for lunch. Oğuzhan wanted us to experience a local eatery, and once again, he delivered.
The food was delicious. I would describe the dishes in greater detail, but that would require having identified them.
There was also far too much of it. This has become one of the great challenges of our trip: we keep being offered wonderful food, and apparently our only defense is to eat it.
With another night in the Yotel ahead, lunch was beginning to raise questions about clearance.
On the way to the airport, we still had several stops to make. First came the Snake Church, a church carved into the rock that takes its name from a painting of a saint killing a serpent. It has two main worship spaces and belongs to a larger complex with a courtyard, kitchens, dining rooms, and burial chambers. Some of its paintings date to the eleventh century.
Getting there from the road was no easy matter. After yesterday’s hiking, our legs had been hoping that “visiting a church” might involve pulling up beside one.
Our penultimate stop was the underground city of Kaymaklı.
The same soft volcanic rock that helped make Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys possible also allowed people to excavate an astonishing network of rooms and passages. At Kaymaklı, these included kitchens, food stores, wine-storage areas, and a church. Wells and ventilation shafts helped people survive underground, while massive stone doors could close passages from the inside.
These underground refuges provided shelter during periods of danger, including raids during the Byzantine era. It is remarkable to imagine the effort involved in creating them—and why people needed them.
It is also remarkable to imagine getting David through them.
Some passages were only four or five feet high, requiring us to proceed in a position normally associated with searching for a shoe under a bed. David had a particularly challenging time, although the rest of us were hardly strolling along with our heads held high.
The rock was soft enough to carve, but not soft enough for my forehead.
After all our complaints about the Yotel, we had voluntarily spent part of the afternoon squeezing through even smaller spaces.
Our final stop was an ATM so we could get cash for tips for Oğuzhan and our driver. Turkey’s largest banknote was 200 lira. At roughly $4 a bill by our reckoning, expressing our appreciation required a substantial amount of paper.
By the time we had assembled the money, Oğuzhan practically needed a briefcase to take it home. We were tipping him, but the handover had the potential to look like the final scene of a bank robbery.
We made it to the airport in time for an uneventful flight back to Istanbul.
And now, the moment you have all been waiting for:
Did we spend the extra €20 for a larger Yotel room?
We did the math. With a 4 a.m. wake-up for our flight to Cairo, we would only be there for about five hours. That made the upgrade roughly €4 per hour for the privilege of occupying different parts of the room at the same time.
We declined.
This time, at least, we had a stronger argument: there would be fewer hours in which to regret it.
After a full day of sightseeing, an enormous lunch, and our training session in the tunnels of Kaymaklı, we were well prepared. We mentally applied a little grease, slid into the sardine can, and went to sleep.
Somewhere in Cappadocia, a potato was stretching out.
