RETHINKING CAPPADOCIA's 'MONASTIC' PAST

Earlier this year I set off to visit the ruins of the Çanlı Kilise, near Aksaray. I'd never been there before and took a taxi driven by a young man for whom the trip was also a first. He was, let's just say, of a somewhat excitable disposition. As we rumbled along the rough road leading to the church we glimpsed off to our left a collection of rock-cut structures eating their way into the hillside.
“There it is!” he yelled, slamming on the brakes. I knew that what we were looking for was a masonry building, which meant that those assorted holes certainly couldn't be it. Still, I was more than happy to hop out of the car and climb the slope to take a look. What we found looked pretty familiar to cave-dwelling me, namely a collection of rock-cut rooms with the occasional carved facade opening onto a church along with lots and lots of roosting holes for pigeons.
The week before I had read a scholarly treatise prosaically titled “A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia,” by the eminent American expert Robert G. Ousterhout. Like most visitors, I'd immediately made the glib assumption that the ruins we'd been looking at, in what is probably best called Çeltek, after the nearest village, were the remains of a monastery. But were they, Ousterhout asked? Wasn't it just as likely that they were the remains of “prestige” houses intended to accommodate the families of those staffing the fortresses scattered about the lower slopes of Hasan Dağı (Mount Hasan) in the early Middle Ages?
From 1994 to1996 Ousterhout and his co-workers carried out an intensive study of the settlement, almost unbelievably the first such examination to be carried out on any of the Cappadocian rock-cut settlements. After mapping all the structures running along the roadside, he concluded that while some might indeed have been monastic in origin there was nothing to suggest that the majority were. Instead he envisaged a community of perhaps several hundred people living here in houses constructed around courtyards and featuring large halls whose purpose remained unclear.
The main part of each house had, he suggested, been carefully planned out, although more and more rooms were later tacked on in an ad hoc manner to serve as stables and storerooms. If that were so it would certainly fit with what I've always been told about the cave homes of Göreme, which is that they had been infinitely adaptable, with husbands hollowing out new rooms as each new child came along.
Ousterhout also pointed out something that I really should have known but that tends to get forgotten now that tourist development has skewed the center of Cappadocia towards the Nevşehir side. Originally, he said, it was Aksaray (then Koloneia) that was the more important town, with the main roads striking south towards the coast from there. It was via this route, he suggested, that the Arab invaders of the seventh century had passed, hence the scattered ruins of many fortresses including the one above Akhisar whose occupants might have made their homes in nearby Çeltek, which was also close to what was then the important ecclesiastical center of Mokissos (now Viranşehir).
Unfortunately, I didn't know any of this when I visited the site back in April. Back then my sights were far too firmly set on finding the church before my taxi driver lost interest. Ah well, another time.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.

PAT YALE (Cihan/Today's Zaman)