Chronicling from Cappadocia!
3 October 2022
We left Chicago yesterday around noon and, after flying nine hours, landed in Istanbul an hour before sunrise. The nonexistent night was well-spent: Turkish Air has excellent food, and an impressive array of videos on Turkish history and tourism. Becca and I were taking notes before we landed.
On the ground, we raced chariots (or at least bulky suitcases) through the airport, checking all the way out and then in again for our domestic flight to Kayseri. We made it in ample time. Again Turkish Air proved its culinary generosity, serving warm tomato-feta breakfast sandwiches on the hour-long flight. Then we landed at a tiny provincial airport in the shadow of a mountain that Basil and Gregory of Nyssa knew well. Once upon a time, Kayseri was Caesarea, capitol of Cappadocia and seat of the archbishopric. Gregory of Nyssa learned and taught rhetoric here. Basil became a priest and then archbishop, spending his inheritance to keep the city’s poor alive through famine and building a “new city” beyond the walls to welcome the poor, the sick, and the travelers. Nothing remains of it today, except the legacy that became the modern hospital.
The roadside view of Kayseri’s mountains
We didn’t tour Kayseri. It was about all we could do to lug our suitcases and sleepy selves to a taxi for the hour-long drive to Avanos. Everything about the landscape here is of excessive interest to me, but we’ll delve into that later. For now, suffice it to say that we arrived at our farm-hotel on tomato paste day. It took me several jet-lagged hours to appreciate the neat full-circle effect of that: the first entry in these chronicles described my foray into making tomato sauce and tomato omelettes. My little saucepan would have fit into the cauldron three hundred times over, and the clay pot-cooked omelette was the thing our Indianapolis omelette dreamed of. But I guess it’s good to know that those recipes were on track!
Leah looking much cooler than she actually is—the tomato stirring was purely a photo op, at our hosts’ invitation.
Four kinds of cheese, three forms of tomatoes, and walnuts off the tree overhead
After some hard naps this afternoon, we strolled down to Avanos for our first foray into the pottery scene. We didn’t have much time, needing to budget sunlight enough for our walk back to the farm, so Becca sadly had to decline the shop proprietor’s offer to let her throw on his wheel. But we got to see the upstairs of his shop. Kitschy Cappadocia trinkets and unglazed 5-lira pots front the street as tourist bait. But inside were the works of art. Decanters to greet the sun and decanters graceful as pelicans, the shape of each entwined with the tales of ancient Hittite gods. There were pieces that took anywhere from five to twenty days to decorate, as the proprietor explained with the aid of google translate. His whole family is involved with the work.
The town center, displaying a promising monument to what makes this little city famous.
All the happy, happy pots
Happily for Becca, our schedule tomorrow is more or less a pottery shop crawl. I expect she’ll have clay on her trousers from most of the studios in Avanos and Göreme before we’re done. Meanwhile I’ll keep scribbling notes on this landscape’s particular palette of green and gold, of willows and poplars and grapes and apples and thistles that dry like sunbursts. I’ve half a mind to set my ikon of Macrina outside and tell her welcome home.
Until next time,
Leah + Becca
Writerly abstraction—and so MANY plants to meet!