23.05.2013 09:09
The thing about living in the real Cappadocia is that it makes it hard to get overly excited about so-called "Little Cappadocias" elsewhere.
The thing about living in the real Cappadocia is that it makes it hard to get overly excited about so-called "Little Cappadocias" elsewhere. Pale imitations, one is snootily inclined to assume, which is why perhaps I had not, until last week, taken very seriously the claims of an area just north of Afyon with this title.
Not that it's pushing it very hard actually. Instead, it prefers to promote itself with reference to local history as the Frig Vadisi (Phrygian Valley). It doesn't take much time poking about in the area, however, to realize that not only is it well within its rights to call itself a Little Cappadocia, but that in some ways it's at least as beautiful as the original and nothing like as heavily developed.
Just as visitors to "my" Cappadocia are often surprised to discover that it covers a large area, so the same is true of this Little Cappadocia. I started my explorations in the village of Ayazini just because the first bus I spotted happened to be going there and had, like the local bus to Çat, plastered its sides with pictures of its rock-cut attractions in a bid to pull in the punters.
The pictures showed a dramatic rock-cut church which, when I reached it, reminded me of Lystra, near Konya, where the church is cut clear out of the rock rather than being cut into it, which is the case in the real Cappadocia. There, the only church that is remotely similar to the one at Ayazini is the one in the Soğanlı Valley that has a neat little external dome. Here, though, the church manages not just a semi-dome jutting out from the rock but also an apse with what look to be very like Romanesque windows.
Internally, the church reminded me of the more secretive of Çavuşin's two St. Johns, which is still soot-blackened from years of having fires lit inside it. At Ayazini too, the ceiling and walls were completely black, so black, in fact, that I wasn't able to decide if there might once have been frescoes.
The further I walked the more I realized that Ayazini has everything that Göreme has, including dramatic gorges and crazy rock formations, tombs carved into the hillsides and stone houses built right into the rocks. On the outskirts, it even has a group of peribacalar (fairy chimneys), blatantly signposted as such to remove any lingering belief in the uniqueness of our own. In the heart of the village, I also stumbled upon a conical rock formation rising into what looked like an actual chimney on top of which a stork had built its nest. We haven't got anything as exotically picturesque as that, sad to say, although we do have our pigeons, which Ayazini does not.
I spent a pleasant hour tracking a stream through a canyon until it emerged in a field opposite Avdalaz Kalesi, a castle in the same sense that Uçhisar Kalesi is a castle, namely an enormous rock shot through with living spaces.
Returning to Afyon, I pondered again the mysterious nature of tourism. At the last count, Göreme had more than 150 hotels and pensions. Ayazini has none. "My" Cappadocia has more than 100 hot-air balloons. The Afyon version has none. How can this be explained? Does it really just come down to the determinedly entrepreneurial nature of the true Cappadocians?
PAT YALE (Cihan/Today's Zaman)