In Cappadocia: Dreamscapes and Dervishes

On our first morning in Cappadocia I awoke to find two dozen hot air balloons floating over the valley outside my window like lamp shades suspended by invisible strings. This is a surreal place; like a dream, but not an earthly one. It’s a moon dream made real.

Driving in the day before, as we got closer to the Cappadocia region, we saw the landscape change dramatically. The colors of the hills ran the gamut from brown to terracotta to mustard yellow. The unusual formations here are hundreds of thousands years old and the result of two nearby volcanoes, Mt. Erciyes and Mt. Hasan, with the assistance of water and erosion, which helped form their very different shapes. The region is full of large rocks, caves, and “fairy chimneys.” I am quite sure Tinkerbell spends her summers here.

We visited the Goreme Open Air Museum (along with hundreds of other tourists) and saw the homes and churches of the early Christians (4th – 11th centuries), where they took refuge from assailants at various points in history. We went to the region with the most fairy chimneys and climbed inside a few. We stopped at three or four places along the road just to take pictures. The bus took us up the steep, sandy slopes of one of the many surrounding hills where we found the workshop of master potter Galip (Chez Galip). Within 15 minutes of stepping off the bus we had been given tea, witnessed the making of a pottery jug by the master himself (that would be Galip), given a lecture on pottery making (clay and porcelain products), and shuttled through the workshop door into a vast and impressive showroom of every kind of pottery imaginable: plates, bowls, cups, clocks, you name it. Though tempted, yours truly resisted. I wanted to buy a dinner size plate (for display only) but found the $40 price tag (not bad, really) much pricier than the $10 or $15 I would have spent in the bazaar. And at this point in the trip, funds are limited. But the master potter turned more than a few bucks off the rest of the group, and we left him waving and smiling in a cloud of dust.

Our time in Cappadocia ended with a late evening performance of the Whirling Dervishes, a worship ceremony of the Mevlavi Sect of the Sufi Order of Islam. The ceremony includes a dance that represents union with God. The dervishes hold their right arms up to receive the blessings of God while holding their left arms down to disseminate those gifts to the people. The Whirling Dervishes are a product of the theological school of Mevlana Celaledin Rumi. To see the ceremony, we packed into a beautifully-renovated kervansaray (an early hotel for trade caravans, dating to the 11th century) with a couple of hundred other tourists for 45 minutes of bowing, chanting, and whirling. They say it’s a good sign if you fall asleep … you are being lulled by the music and whirling … so I don’t feel so badly. We enjoyed cinnamon tea as we exited the kervansaray in route for the bus.

I will never forget Cappadocia. There is something special about this region; almost magical. I hope to visit again and would encourage you to do the same ... dervish or no dervish.