Cappadocia Through Writers' Eyes

It probably doesn't take a lot of guessing to work out that I am the sort of person whose cave home is filled with books. Books on the shelves, books on the tables, books on the floor, books on the radiator (although the latter will have to be found new homes once the temperatures start dropping again).
There are thousands of books in my house, so many that even I sometimes lose track of what's where. So it was that a couple of days ago I was perusing the stacks in search of Tim Mackintosh-Smith's “Travels With A Tangerine” when my eye alighted instead on Christina Dodwell's “A Traveller on Horseback.” Since it had been years since I read this, I flicked it open and found to my surprise that it kicked off with a description of Cappadocia.
In the mid-1980s Dodwell, a British travel writer with several horseback adventures under her belt, decided to ride across Eastern Turkey and Iran. She started by taking a bus from Kuşadası to Nevşehir and putting up in Ürgüp where, at that time, the livestock market took place alongside the more general produce market right in the center of town. There she took out on sale-or-return terms a horse named Beyaz with whom she trotted around the surrounding countryside. Her ride took her to the Sarıhan, near Avanos, in the days before it was restored, and the book contains an almost-vivid description of the multitude of horses and carts that still ruled the roost on the roads back then. In the end, though, Beyaz failed to meet her requirements. Back he went to the market and back went her book to the shelf.
Then my eyes alighted on a thicker volume sitting right beside it, “Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip” by Mark Mordue. If Dodwell's memoir offers a rather plodding, pedestrian look at Cappadocia, Mordue's could hardly be more different. True, only three pages of the book are about the area but what three pages they are! This, I decided, was the post-modern take on travel writing, a technicolor romp round the gossip of 1990s Göreme complete with descriptions of a Pei-style glass pyramid in front of the Open-Air Museum and a disco ball perched atop the Roma Kalesi (Roman Castle) like a cherry on a cupcake. Both were aberrations that have since been consigned to history and ruefully I remembered being the source for these stories when the author and I had been staying at the same time in a local pension. A quick Google search revealed that Mordue had gone on, hardly surprisingly, to write a prize-winning biography of Nick Cave.
One other slim volume had slipped down between these two: Patrick Leigh Fermor's “A Time To Keep Silence.” After Mordue's frenetic prose (sample sentence, “Spin that disco ball, baby, let Town Hall One take you higher”) Leigh Fermor's reads like a sonnet. Here was the grand old man of travel writing, lost to us a mere three years ago, describing the rock formations that have kept me company for the last 16 years, “a dead, ashen world, filled, not with craters and shell-holes, but with cones and pyramids and monoliths from fifty to a couple of hundred feet high, each one a rigid isosceles of white volcanic rock like the headgear of a procession of Spanish penitents during Passion Week.”
Horses for courses, of course, but my money's on Leigh Fermor.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.

PAT YALE (Cihan/Today's Zaman)