I think it’s probably fair to say that users of public transport don’t feature very highly in the list of priorities with the movers and shakers of Nevşehir. I don’t say this just because the new bus station is way out in the middle of nowhere – that, after all, is a feature of public transport countrywide these days. No, I say it because this week I decided to pay a visit to Nar, the once small village a couple of kilometres away from Nevşehir that these days struggles to retain any kind of separate existence as high-rise housing blocks increasingly fill in the space between the two settlements.
It’s not that there aren’t plenty of dolmuşes to Nar (which means pomegranate in Turkish even though there’s precious little sign of such a fruit in a village whose emblem is instead a giant bunch of black grapes). No, the service runs like clockwork every twenty minutes. The problem is where you have to wait for it because Nevşehir lacks one of those desirable köy garajs (village bus stations) where all the local transport is handily collected together in a venue providing somewhere to sit down, shelter from the weather and even, perhaps, the chance of a nice glass of çay.
Instead we have to wait at the Meteris Kavsağı, an ugly mess of a crossroads where the only seats provided are for passengers traveling east to the tourism hotspots of Göreme and Avanos. Even those are made of cold, hard metal and placed in a location which in summer is way too hot and in winter way too cold. As for the Nar folks, forget it. They must stand on a narrow stretch of pavement with no kind of shelter from the elements at all. The board listing the times of the bus services says it all. A plaque of rusting metal, it looks as if it’s been nailed to the wall since the declaration of the Republic, certainly for so long that the bottom has started to curl up in despair.
Nar itself, when I get there, turns out to be a pleasant place, sleepy and quiet, a world away from Nevşehir even though the Forum Shopping Centre now dominates many of the views. But like so many of the Cappadocian villages that missed the tourism boat, its population is in sharp decline with many erstwhile residents long since moved into Nevşehir. To walk round the Asağı Mahalle (Lower Neighbourhood), where most of the old cave-houses were, is to walk amid sad ruins with modern houses shoehorned into the spaces in between them. It’s impossible to escape the thought that this is what Göreme might have come to had it not made such a success out of tourism.
And why had I come to Nar, a place that hardly tops most people’s travel itineraries? Well, I’m in pursuit of one of the first expats to settle in Cappadocia, of course. Joyce Roper was a British woman, a disillusioned art teacher who moved to Nar and lived there for three years at the start of the 1970s, writing a book about her experiences, The Women of Nar, which provides a poignant reminder not just of the old residents but also of a way of life now on its very last legs.
So on a sunny February Friday I’ve come here in search of anyone who might remember Joyce.
Her book contains a handy sketch-map of the Aşağı Mahalle, which means that at least I know where to start looking. I quickly track down the fountain and the old communal çamaşırhane (laundry) behind it where Roper recorded scrubbing flea-infested carpets from the home of an elderly neighbour. Of the old bulgur mill, however, there’s no sign. Roper had described it as being beneath a mosque near her rented house but when I peek into the cave under the most obvious mosque it’s to find only a room piled high with redundant school desks.
A woman is walking past. “Was there once an old mill here?” I ask but she shakes her head: “It’s gone now,” she says.
Encouraged by her seeming readiness to talk, I show her the copy of the book I’ve brought with me. The front cover features a black and white photograph of Pembe, the teenager who became a substitute daughter to the childless Roper. It was Pembe I was most hoping to track down even though the book had described her wedding to a police officer from Ankara. But, alas, Bezime Hanım shakes her head again. “She died in a car accident,” she tells me. “Her husband married again. Her children? I don’t know – I think one lives in İstanbul now.”
“Do you remember Sevinç Hanım (the name the locals had given to Roper)?”
“Yes, this was where she used to live,” Bezime says, pointing towards a typical Cappadocian stone house with solid windows and a big gate. “But she died a long time ago,” she goes on, before adding that she had been a tall blonde woman which came as news to me since nowhere in the book is there a description of the author, let alone a photograph.
Then Bezime takes it from my hands and starts to flick through the photographs. “Dead, dead,” she intones in a matter-of-fact voice, ticking off the images and occasionally turning to indicate where people had lived. Then she points to a new house right beside us. “My neighbour has a photocopy of the book,” she says. My ears prick up. “Is she home, do you think?” I ask.
“No, she’s gone to the dentist in Nevşehir. But I’ll tell her you visited,” said Bezime before we go our separate ways.
On my own again, I stand in front of Roper’s old home, now a derelict shell where once it had echoed with life and laughter. The book has a photo of Pembe, her hair twisted into knots and piled high on her head, dancing at her wedding party beneath its stone arches. At that time, Roper reported, seventy percent of Turks still lived in villages and the picture she painted was of a rural life virtually identical to the one I’d found in Göreme in 1998. Today, though, the figure has been upended. More than seventy percent of Turks now live in towns and the old Cappadocian way of life is fast heading towards extinction.
As I turn away from the derelict house some of the stories from The Women of Nar run around in my head. There was, for example, the grisly circumcision ceremony that she attended: “Two fiddlers (were) scraping away as loudly as they could in a hopeless effort to drown the yells of a twelve-year-old boy. Men were holding him down with his bare legs apart over a big polythene washing-up bowl. An old grey unshaven drunken gypsy man was sawing away at his foreskin, every now and then refreshing himself with a swig from a bottle of raki…”
And this: “(The healer) grated a long bar of soap and mixed it with the meringue till it was all a huge stiff mass …on some muslin headveils…and made it all tight with some bandages…(but) there were several breaks and the whole thing was smelly when the German car insurance firm said that she was to be taken to Kayseri Hospital…she didn’t come home for eight months.”
Even this: (She) led me out into a quiet back street and down some steps to a door which a woman answered… We were led into a cellar storeroom… I hastily chose three plain plates… that furtive way of shopping is forced by custom on the Nevşehir women.”
But not any more, it’s not, I think, remembering the happy crowds that head for the Forum Shopping Mall these days to do little more than stroll up and down and window-shop. It’s easy to romanticise the past until we’re forced to confront some of its less palatable aspects. Yes, I loved reading about the camaraderie of the Nar women as they worked together in their gardens. I loved reading about the weddings where the women danced to the beat of a def (tambourine) and the click of wooden spoons rather than having to stuff their ears with cottonwool to lessen the ferocious roar of over-amplified music as I’e been forced to do at recent Cappadocian weddings. But was life really better then than now? It’s certainly highly questionable.
In the small Belediye building I find Nuri Bey nursing a glass of çay in the kitchen. I show him the book with its black-and-white images of the Nar of forty years ago. “Do you remember Sevinç Hanım?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says cheerfully. “I was about seven then, I think. She looked just like you. She could have been your relative.” Bezime Hanım had described her as tall and blonde. I am short and dark. Clearly all yabancıs look the same to the locals.
Nuri Bey inspects the sketch map and starts reeling off the fate of the village residents. Höke: dead. Kesver: in an old people’s home. Then he homes in on the family trees reproduced in the book. He can’t find his own name on them even though he had grown up in the same mahalle (neighbourhood). Embarrassed, I get up to leave. Nuri photocopies the images of the people he didn’t recognise so he can try and identify them. Less than half-an-hour later I’m back at the Meteris Kavşağı.
