Down the Rabbit Hole and into Turkey’s Heartland

Sad Update:

What an unfortunate blow — our camera was stolen en route to or in Istanbul, so we do not have very many pictures from Cappadocia.  We’ve got insurance on the camera, so it was almost harder to lose our great pictures, which can’t be replaced.  We’re not sure when we’ll get a new camera, so there’ll be no pictures from Budapest or Munich. You’ll have to make do with our witty prose.

 

Tanned, scrubbed, and relaxed, we left Turkey’s stunning Mediterranean coast and headed northeast into its very center.

Konya

Konya is a town on Turkey’s Bible Belt (Koran Belt?), a politically and religiously conservative place known as the center of the Mevlevi order, part of the mystical Sufi order of Islam. For tourists and religious pilgrims, it’s the home of the whirling dervishes.  The Mevlevi order was founded in the 13th century by a man named Rumi, an Islamic poet and theologian.  Adherants of the order still put on a public Sema ceremony — where the dervishes whirl — every Saturday.

The Sema represents a mystical journey of man’s spiritual ascent through mind and love to perfection. His tall hat represents his gravestone, his white outfit his shroud. The dancers’ right hands are raised to the sky, ready to receive God’s beneficence; their left hands are turned toward the earth. It’s like they enter a trance, communing with God, and watching them spin, and spin, and spin puts you into a trance, too. (On a more practical note, it looks like they whirl with their eyes closed — how do they not bump into one another Three Stooges style?)

Cappadocia

This is how our time in Cappadocia started:

Me: Hi! We’re here to check in.

Man behind the desk: Yes. My name is Mujahideen. Let me show you to your cave room.

Me: Great, wait . . . .  Did you say Mujahideen?

Him: You may call me Muja. Would you like a cup of tea?

Me: OOOOK.

 

It was a memorable start to three days in one of our Turkish favorites: Cappadocia.  This place is truly unlike anywhere we’ve ever been on this planet.  It’s closer to something from your dreams.

The landscape here rises in the oddest formations — rounded domes that look like multi-colored sand dunes, giant toadstools (or phalluses, depending on your point of view), skinny ” fairy chimneys.”  We spent days hiking the valleys around here, picking apples and grapes from wild orchards as we went, and kept being delighted at these landscapes that seem straight out of Alice in Wonderland or the Land of Oz.  It seems appropriate that many people start their day here flying on a big hot air balloon.

 

But wait, there’s more!  Hidden away inside these strange rocks are beautiful churches used by early Christians to escape Roman persecution.  Some are covered in beautiful, intricate frescoes, others have just crudely drawn red ochre decorations, and others (my personal favorites) nothing but natural white stone, carved into pillars and domes out of the rock.  People lived in the Earth in Cappadocia — in the massive caves or in huge cities (holding up to 10,000 people) contained entirely underground.

 

There’s really only one word for Cappadocia: wow.