KONYA TO CAPPADOCIA, TURKEY AND GOREME NATIONAL PARK—May 11, 2013

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Hotel Pasa Park in Konya, Turkey

As we turned out of the hotel area, we drove past a large city conference center that was hosting a multi-cultural youth event. A little further on, we saw a plot of small community gardens with little garden huts just like in Germany and Great Britain (called allotments there). There were also a lot of new apartments on the outskirts of town that Aykut said were new retirement communities. We have been impressed with all of the new developments in Turkey, and the apparent quality of the construction.

Soon we were in a very fertile area with wheat, and more wheat---hard to believe that the world eats so much bread. I know they eat a lot of it here in Turkey, as baskets of bread show up at every meal, mostly French type, and huge bins of rolls and sliced breads including a pita type are served at every breakfast, lunch and dinner buffet we have been at. We have watched people pile plates of 6-8 slices for breakfast at a time.

Butter is NOT served with the bread, unless you ask for it. Jam to put on the bread is something else---it is very runny, served in big bowls at breakfast that you then scoop into little cups. (One place had the cups made out of ice cream cone material but usually they are glass or pottery.) It has the consistency of honey or a fruit syrup, but has very good flavor even if you have to lick it off your fingers, hands, or clean the front of your shirt.

There are at least 6 different kinds of fruits offered including quince, which they must eat a lot of, as we have seen it more than apples. The apples we have seen have only been fresh or dried in tiny, tiny pieces to add to tea.

Alaattin Keykubatt Caravanseri

For our first stop, we pulled in front of a 1229 AD caravanserai, named Alaattin Keykubatt, the largest one built in Turkey. The caravanserai was ruined by fire and in 1278 was rebuilt and extended by the governor of the time. These are walled enclosed buildings with a huge courtyard in the middle built to protect trade caravans as they traveled on the silk trade route. The open courtyard was used in the summer and enclosed rooms were for the winter.

Originally there was a string of caravanserai built a day’s ride apart across this area. The traders brought all of their goods and camels inside at night to protect them from pirates that frequently robbed the caravans along this route. Each caravan was checked in and then the next morning if anything was missing, the Sultan promised to pay for it. It was the first “insurance” to encourage trade and thereby boost the economy of the Ottoman Empire.

Cappadocia Region

After touring the caravanserai, we drove on further east and into the Cappadocia Region. The guide explained as we traveled along that 5 very active volcanoes in this region laid down tons of ash, which under heat, became rock. This happened twice, so there are two distinct layers of different colors and hardness. On top of the soft sedimentary limestone-looking rock, called tuff, was then laid a hard layer of basalt. The same kind of thing has been formed in Utah and are called hoodoos, but in this area, they are 20x's larger. The softer tuff wore away with water and wind and left pointed huge tepees, pillars, mushrooms, chimneys, and other shaped formations capped by the harder basalt. Some of these are over 1130 feet high.

Early inhabitants of Cappadocia hollowed out the formations, putting in windows and doors, and lived in them until the 1970’s when the government declared them unsafe after several of them had collapsed after the homes were expanded and the walls got too thin. About 40 such communities are located in this region with some of the cities completely underground. Many of these communities were built by early Christians to hide from the Romans and had traps and other defensive mechanism built into their tunnels.

At lunch time we pulled into a town that had a cafeteria on the second floor above a maxi-mart store. We had one of the best lunches here. I had a chicken breast rolled over a rice and currant mixture and Valerie had a lamb souvlaki with a cream cheese sauce. As we like to do, we wandered through the grocery store to see what the Turks devoted an unusual amount of shelf space to—in this case, it was bulgur wheat and refrigerated cases of olives and peppers.

GoremeNational Park

We then drove to an outdoor museum and World Heritage Site, GoremeNational Park. This community was definitely early Christian (4^th century AD) as both a convent and a monastery were located across from each other. We were able to look at three churches hollowed into the rock where they painted the inside with frescoes--no pictures were allowed to be taken inside--so that was disappointing. They reminded us in style of the painted churches in Romania. One large “cave building” had a kitchen, storage rooms, a long carved out table with a painted Last Supper at the end on the wall, as well as houses, carved out of it.

The people in this area made their living from growing potatoes, grapes, and apricots. They made and traded wine and pottery.

Carpet Weaving

Our next stop was to see how weaving was done. Actually, we would have said how carpets were made. We had a guide from the carpet factory greet us and show the entire process from the plants used to dye the wool or silk fiber, how the silk was gathered from the silk worms, to how the women wove these fibers into carpets.

At the end, they presented a variety of different carpets for us to see the differences between silk and wool and the variety of different patterns carpets were woven in—both historically and modern. At one point they let us take off our shoes and walk across them so we could feel the differences. Of course, at the end they were very ready to take your order for your carpet to be shipped to your home (if you paid enough). Valerie got a little asthmatic from all of the fibers flitting through the air, so she went out and walked around the town a bit.

It was early evening before we pulled into the Altinyazi Hotel in Avanos and got our room assignments. We will be here for two nights in order to see everything. Dinner and breakfast were served buffet style, and we were the first ones to the restaurant as we didn’t realize that dinner was at 7:30, which is a little later than we would like. Several of our group signed up to go ballooning EARLY in the morning; they had wake-up calls at 5am. This area is a well-known ballooning venue with over a hundred balloons in the air every morning at one time.

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