Cappadocia in Five Acts

It's been a long day. So I'm presenting it in 5 acts.

Act I: Balloons

We woke up at 5am. Let me repeat. 5am. It was miserable. The sun hadn't even come up yet.

At 5:45 we had loaded into a minibus that took us (just the students, Karanfil and Zaynep) to a pitiful breakfast buffet. But as the sun rose our spirits brightened, because we were being taken to a hot air balloon!

We got a good deal on a hot air balloon ride. What is normally 160€/person we managed to knock down to 70€ each. Cappadocia is now the number one destination for hot air ballooning, and we found out why.

Cappadocia Voyager Balloons took us in a massive basket through valleys, past fairy chimneys, and into the sky over 800m! We passed snow covered hills and barren plateaus, hidden caves and sandy dunes. It was breathtaking. Other balloons joined us, many of them, dotting the sky with all kinds of colors.

I was admittedly timid about the balloon ride. After all, you're standing in a basket - a woven, flammable basket - under a large canvas enclosure, with a pilot (Sadi was his name) firing flames full force into it. If I was so inclined, jumping out (or falling) would be easy. There was no safety lecture. Besides, as Fuat, who met us there and joined us on the ride kept reminding us, the pilot does not control the direction of the balloon, only the height. All these fears were laid to rest when I realized that we were already 40 feet off the ground and I hadn't even felt us taking off.

We came to a gentle landing several miles from the starting point, after about an hour in the air. Some coworkers of our pilot brought a trailer to load the basket into, and our pilot masterfully landed us directly on the trailer.

After we got out, everyone grinning ear-to-ear from the experience, we were given some sort of sparkling champagne substitute, and then we were back on the van to go to the hotel.

Act II: Fairy Chimneys

About 9:30 we took the bus a little ways and hiked over a hill to find a cluster of fairy chimneys. These are the remains of volcanic plateaus that eroded away, leaving pillars whose dense stones on top keep the porous base from eroding. Sevim likened it, in great detail, to a cake with nuts. The icing is the first to go when you pour water on it, but the nuts hold down the cake in part, leaving fairy chimneys.

These were really quite beautiful. A few were carved into, and I crawled up into one, up a few stairs and then through a vertical shaft. Inside I found two caves, suspended above the ground, one on top of the other. They were beautiful and offered another great view of the other fairy chimneys, as well as a look at the kind of life the hermit who used to live there led.

Others came after me into the chimney, and we took some fun photos up there. But all good things must end, and we were ushered after a little while to the next stop. Emily and I even had to forego a camel ride to leave.

Act III: Göreme Açikhava Müzesi

In Göreme, where we were (within the Cappadocia region) there's a series of cave churches in a little clustered complex. Our next stop.

Some of the cave churches dated back as far as the 2nd or 3rd centuries. They had simple red painted walls and ceilings which, if they didn't accompany some more impressive frescos on occasion, I would have thought were drawn by a five year old with a very long lasting red crayon. Others, like the dark church, were detailed and incredibly impressive works of art, with medieval frescos covering every inch of the interior. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but I snapped a ton without flash from a hidden position. Some things are too glorious to not capture on film.

Outside Göreme Açikhava Müzesi, we stopped at another cave church. This one was much larger than the others, and had obvious evidence of eons of use. There were exposed parts showing the red crayon drawings of the 2nd and 3rd centuries; there was a large central corridor that boasted frescos of an early medieval period; there was a larger interior on whose walls are depicted countless biblical passages in a mid-to-high medieval style. In short, a very fascinating structure.

Act IV: The Valley of Death

To pass time between the Open Air Museum and the nighttime entertainment, Sevim took us on a hike. Sean opted out, but everyone else went. The bus put us at the start to Meşkendir (or something like that) valley, and picked us up in the town we ended up in. It was not an easy hike for all involved. Snow still on the ground made for icy terrain, water from the slowly melting snow made the ground that wasn't ice into mud, and the inclines did not help the situation.

But it was a fun time regardless. We passed through the valley, uninjured, to the other side.

Some highlights: pigeon holes, carved into the rock by people hundreds of years ago, were used to house pigeons so their feces could be collected and used for fertilizer. This practice only went out of common use about 40 years ago. I found a pigeon hole a little ways up a cliff and climbed inside. It was small, but little indents in the walls made perfect beds for the pigeons.

We stumbled across a small church. Well, it was a fairy chimney church, tucked into a pillar of stone. Only two minor remains of frescos are still on the wall, both of saints, and the room could only hold maybe 8 worshippers, but it was really cool to find along the side of the road and climb up into.

A man was selling drinks on the side of the road. He had clearly had no customers that day but still insisted on quoting me 4TL for a diet coke. I quickly rejected it and brought him to 2, which would still give him a profit margin... I felt bad for him, after all.

Act V: Sarihan Caravan Sarayi

We got back to the hotel and changed overly dirty clothes (though I'm pretty much out of options. Last laundry I did was in Kiev). At 5 we met to go to a show.

Whirling Dervishes is a Sufi tradition of spinning meditation in a trance. Five men, dressed in long white robes, accompanied by five musicians and a leader, performed the act. The musicians were two flautists (well, recorder players), an Oud player, a santur player, and a drummer with two drums.

At 5:45 sharp the 10 men arrived on the small stage one by one. We were seated on one side, and other groups were on the other two sides.

The show began with one of the flautists singing a prayer, then a long instrumental. The dervishes then rise from their place of kneeling and circled the stage slowly three times, bowing to each other the whole way. After the third rotation they began whirling, with one hand limp above them, pointing to the earth, and the other open above as well, facing the sky. To the music they turned, turned, turned. This lasted for a while, with 5 separate sets of whirling. At the end, the leader read from the Quran and sung a final blessing before they all departed as they had come in, one by one.

I struggled to stay awake and warm, exhausted from the 5am wakeup and the hike, and without a jacket indoors. I didn't account for the cold wind coming from being so close (front row) to the whirling dervishes.

Probably the coolest thing about the show was its location, Sarihan Caravan Sarayi. This was a stop along the silk route, where caravans would stay for free up to three days along their journey. They didn't even touch much on that, but it was really cool.

Our group had a romantic Valentine's Day dinner, wine and all, at a restaurant called Ziggy's after the show, a place that our professor Karanfil found for us. She met the chef years ago after falling in love with his cooking and made sure to bring us to his new place on this trip. We were not disappointed.

We walked back to the hotel, which took a little while, and drank some in some rooms. The guys ended up on the 5th floor watching a soccer game. After Barcelona won, we split up. Bed around midnight.