A time-traveling tale

Çat is a small village near Nevşehir but just far enough off the main road to miss out on the crowds. I'd been there once before in the early days of my sojourn in the area when everything was new and exciting. In my memory it had been quite a long way away so it was a surprise to discover that it was actually a mere seven kilometers out of Nevşehir. I remembered a wonderful rock wall carved with pigeon houses whose owners had pulled out all the stops when it came to decorating them. But most of all I remembered the saga of a village shopping debacle.

As my friend and I were ambling about the village we'd come across a corner where someone had collected together many of the old wooden horse-carts that used to be used to get out to the fields. They were for sale and I rather fancied that one of them would make a colorful adornment for my courtyard.

Wheels were inspected, prices were discussed. Agreement had been reached and money had changed hands before it occurred to me to think about the mechanics of getting a battered old cart, clearly too big to fit in the car's trunk, back to Göreme. The salesman was wise to the potential value to be added to his sale and the price he quoted for transportation was nothing short of ludicrous. “Mehmet's father has a tractor,” my friend whispered and that appeared to be that.

You can probably guess the end to this story. Somehow we never got around to organizing that tractor. Somehow we never went back to Çat. To this day, then, there may well be some old wooden cart, a great deal the worse for wear, sitting in someone's backyard with my name on it. That's if it hasn't gone for firewood, of course.

Now on a bright, sunny February day I finally found myself back in Çat, wincing at the ugliness of the sculptured tower that someone had seen fit to inflict on its center. But that was soon forgotten as I followed the signs to the Çat Vadisi (valley), because suddenly without warning I felt myself projected back into the Göreme of 1998, a place where chickens still roamed the streets and the odd whiff of manure attested to cows and horses tethered in cave stables behind high walls.

As I wandered the streets women enquired who I was looking for or called out to invite me for tea, a reminder if ever one was needed that the best form of security is a local's familiarity with who is and is not one of their own. As for the Çat Vadisi itself, what can I say? Great sweeps of rock loomed on either side of a brook. Empty pigeon houses by the hundred sat awaiting new tenants. That dolmuş only needs to keep up the silent publicity effort and surely the village will soon be as well known as Uçhisar.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.