Fairy towers and death cabs
I visit one of Turkey's national treasures and almost die in the process
Cappadocia doesn’t seem quite real. Sitting smack dab in the center of Turkish Anatolia is a natural and historical treasure that must have been the natural conclusion of a summit between Cormac McCarthy, early Church fathers, and Dr. Seuss. Unless you’re a latter-day Luddite, you have probably seen Cappadocia—Google “hot air balloon turkey” and you’ll see images that have likely graced your screensaver at one point. It’s got scenery, it’s got photogenic rug shops, it’s got balloons and horses. It’s the stuff of influencers’ dreams, and a few weeks ago I visited during one of its lowest tourism periods in recent memory.
My friends and I land at the Kayseri airport after a short flight from Istanbul, where we walk down the plane gangway into chilled air and the sort of tiny airport that always makes me feel like I’m in The Adventures of TinTin. An hour’s bus ride brings us to Ortahisar, a village that we’d call home for the next few days. Our AirBnB, like the rest of the village and like much of Cappadocia’s architecture, is built right into the hillside. My bedroom is a literal cave, straight out of Tatooine, replete with shelves carved into the rock walls and a shower in which I cannot stand up straight (honestly a real ego kick). A curving stairway brings us up to a common room with an arched ceiling that I swear was used in the filming of the fourth Harry Potter. Across the way sits a kitchen housing five extremely active cats. “You feed them,” our AirBnB host tells us. Straight out of the kitchen windows, a castle of natural rock reaches into the clouds, the Turkish flag waving at the top.
Our host sits us down at the table. “Tonight is free, no problem,” he says.
We look at each other. “Um, thanks. We really appreciate it. Why…?”
He looks at us and smiles. “Tonight is free. Tomorrow is free.”
Thinking two free nights in the AirBnB sounds too good to be true, we realize that he’s not giving us discounts. He’s asking about our plans. We tell him we have none.
“We have literally no plans yet in Cappadocia.”
Here he senses an opening, and proceeds to schedule every waking moment of our next few days, including meals. He’s a flurry of phone calls to his Cappadocian friends. Hammams, hot air balloon rides, homemade breakfasts, and horseback rides flow from the authority vested in our host. Afterwards, he points to a mandolin on the wall and makes me play. Then he plays it while making me sing like a common monkey. Then he leaves, meows the only noise left in his wake.
That night, I sleep the best sleep I’ve ever had, meters of rock keeping the cold air at bay. I think cavemen were wiser than we credit.
The next morning, first order of business is feeding the five insistent cats that are jumping across the rafters. We toss them bits of salami, playing God by giving preferential slices to the friendliest among the pack. Cats sated, we head outside, where a stranger ushers us into his SUV. Ignoring every piece of parental advice from our childhood, we pile in. He speaks no English, so we say a prayer that this is indeed our contact for today’s pre-arranged breakfast. He takes us out into the Cappadocian country, and we roll to a halt next to a concrete apartment complex. Our driver gets out and leads us up a set of stairs into his apartment, where a set table awaits: breakfast after all. We carb up like marathoners.
Filled with bread, we pile back into our trusty guide’s car, which brings us back to the CaveBnB. Our beggarly cats peek their heads over the wall, but unfortunately for them, we’re off to Göreme, the throbbing heart of Cappadocia’s tourism.
Today, though, Covid’s Göreme looks and feels like a Western ghost town—I swear to God, there are even tumbleweeds. A lone simit salesman stalks us from a distance, basket balanced on his head. Almost all of the restaurants are closed, and a confusingly high proportion of the signs are in Russian. We wander the deserted streets, befriending a stray dog, whom we name Eve. We come to a rug store, recommended by Trip Advisor, but quickly discover that the owner is a tyrant who makes 90% of his living charging influencers for “candid” photos within his carpet kingdom. Sensing that we have a cumulative Insta following of < 10k, he prods us to leave. Eve is much better company.
After refueling on pottery kebabs, we cab to the day’s major event: horseback riding. Horses have become a conversational centerpiece among my friends, as some of them are convinced riding one will be the last thing they ever do, so it’s fun to finally hit the ol’ dusty ranch and see the fear really shine in their eyes. We line up one by one to saddle up, some of us having clearly never seen a movie and walking right behind the horse’s hind legs but I guess that’s a subject for another day @Imran). I don’t remember my horse’s name, but I do remember the name of the horse in front of me: Princess, who takes every chance she can to eat branches and is consequently thicc as hell.
Our journey takes us through valley after valley of Cappadocian country, teeming with hollowed-out rock towers called home by centuries of residents. They stick out like so many sharp teeth from the dusty ground. To add to the Seussian vibes, they’re called fairy towers. It’s hard not to be obsessed with them, to wonder at their mystery, to want to burrow your own.
But as with most tourist destinations, once you pull your eyes away from the stunning vistas, you notice a few bricks out of place in the façade. The first instance of this for me happens during the horseback ride. I try striking up conversation with the kid guiding my horse. He looks around 14. He stares at me blankly. The lead guide turns around and tells me that the kid is not Turkish, but Syrian—a refugee. He says that all the kids working with the horses are refugees from Syria and Iraq.
I feel like I’ve woken up from a dream. I don’t think I’ve ever met a refugee, and certainly not one from Syria. My head fills with questions—did he come to Turkey alone? What has he seen? Do they treat him well here? Will he go back someday? But these questions don’t find an answer, at least not for me. I watch his face for some sort of clue, but there’s none there—he laughs with the other kids, stares into the distance, teases the horse. I wonder if I’m trying to write tragedy onto his face. We keep riding, getting our fill of pictures along the way.
A few days later, we’ve played most of Cappadocia’s hits. We’ve done four-wheeling, which felt largely like a traffic jam and seems like it would be intolerable during peak tourism. We’ve shot up to 1,000 meters in a hot air balloon as the sun crests over distant mountain peaks, casting fairy tower shadows across the valley, our chattering teeth overdubbed with oohs and ahs (side note: who knew that a deflating hot air balloon could look so… Lovecraftian? See pic below). We’ve even celebrated Thanksgiving in as American a way as we could: gorging ourselves at a steakhouse.
Now we’re heading to Derinkuyu, an hour outside of town. Eighteen stories deep and historical home to as many as 20,000, Derinkuyu is one of the world’s largest underground cities. Locals fleeing persecution back to the 7th century BCE have found refuge in the city’s mazelike protection. They also built as they hid—Derinkuyu has wineries, stables, a school, and even a cruciform church on the lowest level, not to mention a system of boulder doors straight out of Sunday School depictions of Jesus’ tomb, ready to be rolled into place to prevent attackers from accessing the city.
We arrive at Derinkuyu thirty minutes before the city opens to the world above. To pass the time, we grab tea next door. We sit around a wood-burning stove, sipping from tulip glasses as the proprietor makes small talk. We say where we’re from, how long we’ve been in Turkey. He tells us he is a high school history teacher. Then, using his phone to translate, he starts talking about politics. We talk a bit about Trump before he says:
“In Turkey, we have perfect democracy.”
We all chuckle. Turkey’s government under Erdoğan is hardly a beacon of well-functioning liberalism. But he doesn’t laugh, he talks into his phone, which prods us in its robotic female voice:
“Why do you laugh when I say this?” He goes on: “Turkey has a perfect democracy, unlike the US. In the US, you treat foreigners terribly. You treat black people terribly. Police kill you. In Turkey, the police could never kill you. You believe Turkey is beneath you because of US propaganda, but this is false.”
We’re all silent. What do you say to somebody like that, whose ability to deliver a cutting (and accurate) critique of a foreign society while failing to internalize his own country’s history of genocide and displacement of minorities stands as a textbook example of doublethink? You say “Oh my God, you’re just like us.”
We don’t. We awkwardly pay and walk away. But as we’re exploring Derinkuyu’s network of cramped tunnels, dragging ourselves spelunk-style into nooks that tourists aren’t supposed to find, I can’t quite shake the conversation from my brain.
A few days later, we say our goodbyes to Cappadocia. I take a walk by myself, basking in the silence, befriending a cat who matches my slow pace. I take in our little valley, pockmarked by cave houses, overshadowed by the otherworldly rock castle and its proud Turkish flag unfurling red. Little did I know that in a few hours time, I’d be silently pleading with God for my life.
It began so innocuously; the simple hailing of a cab. Tired from our flight, Katie and I take the first driver who sees us. We load our bags and settle into the back, ready for a relaxing drive to Istanbul proper.
For context, by this point I’ve had my share of unfortunate cab rides in Istanbul. There’s the driver who kicked me out of the cab because he was sick of traffic. There’s the driver who took off confidently in the opposite direction of my apartment, thinking I said “Atakoy” when I said “Ortakoy” (honest mistake). There’s the driver who took a detour to pick up his girlfriend (?) from a bar and drop her off to meet another man (??) during my cab ride (???). But nothing could have prepared me for the forty minutes of live-action Mad Max that awaited us.
My memory honestly cuts out for the first half of the ride, which I think is my mind’s way to cope. My first memory is holding onto Katie’s hand with white knuckles as our driver merges onto a crowded highway while going nearly 110 mph. This is a man who speeds up on the turns, who condescendingly glares at every driver without the balls to go fifty over the speed limit, whose car does not have seatbelts. He is that person you judge and fear on the highway, the teenager at whom you tsk tsk—yet quietly envy—as he slips his souped-up Honda Accord into impossible gaps in the traffic. I’m here to tell you that there is nothing to envy.
He careens, he accelerates, he makes snap judgments in fleeting moments where our chances of survival rest below 30%. I’m actively sweating into the pleather. I make peace with death, sad that I will never see my family or eat Turkish delight again. The taximeter is soaring into the stratosphere with sadistic glee.
Suddenly, we’re in Beşiktaş, a few minutes from home. Our driver has the gall to start pointing out tourist sites to us, as if we were pensioners on a Big Bus. He drops us off, and I can hardly stand, my legs are shaking so badly. I’d never been so grateful for solid ground. We pay our fare, and he speeds off into oblivion.
