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Viewing Jerphanion In Paris

20.11.2014 12:23

In a Paris apartment a friend rummages among books and papers piled high on a shelf above the bed. At last he finds what he was looking for, heaves it down, dusts it off and opens it on the sitting room table. It's a folder full of photographic plates taken from Father Guillaume de Jerphanion's ground-breaking study of Cappadocia's rock-cut churches. He was given it by a descendant of the priest. I am green with envy.Many years ago when I was working for the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey I had a bit of a spat with a visiting academic. Why do you devote so much space in the book to the Göreme Open Air Museum, she wanted to know? That's not what people come here to see. They come here to see the scenery.I argued vociferously that it was the churches that had led to Göreme's being listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.

In a Paris apartment a friend rummages among books and papers piled high on a shelf above the bed. At last he finds what he was looking for, heaves it down, dusts it off and opens it on the sitting room table. It's a folder full of photographic plates taken from Father Guillaume de Jerphanion's ground-breaking study of Cappadocia's rock-cut churches. He was given it by a descendant of the priest. I am green with envy.
Many years ago when I was working for the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey I had a bit of a spat with a visiting academic. Why do you devote so much space in the book to the Göreme Open Air Museum, she wanted to know? That's not what people come here to see. They come here to see the scenery.

I argued vociferously that it was the churches that had led to Göreme's being listed as a UNESCO world heritage site. In reality, one of the less palatable truths about guidebook writing work is that there are so many hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions to be visited in the limited research time available that it's hard to justify taking whole days out to explore valleys without any hotels, restaurants or tourist attractions in them. What that meant was that I had only explored small areas of the rocky landscape, especially since back then they were even less well signposted than they are today.

Now, poring over those black and white photographs taken in 1912 by the man who did most to alert the world to the Byzantine wonders of eastern Cappadocia, I felt justified once again in my defense of their importance.

Then came an embarrassing revelation. Gathered in that Paris sitting room were a man born in Avanos, his wife of more than 30 years, and me, a resident of Göreme. We all pride ourselves on knowing the area really well, so it was a tad galling to find that we were unable to recognize one or two of the images. There were many excuses. The labeling of the place names was in a transliteration system no longer in use today. It is also conceivable that some of the churches are no longer accessible (as in the case of the reputedly lovely Church of St. Mary, now in too dangerous a condition to be shown to the public) or that they have changed out of all recognition. However, in my case at least, it left me guiltily aware that now that the tourist season has wound down I should probably get out there again and revisit even the best known of the churches to refresh my memory for the details.

It also left me thinking that it was about time someone made a matching set of black and white images to place alongside these originals so that exactly what has and hasn't changed would be clear. That someone can't be me since I'm nowhere near a good enough photographer. But if there's a photographer out there with time on their hands and the wherewithal to get the necessary permissions this surely would be a project worth undertaking. Who knows -- we might even be able to get an exhibition organized in one of the smaller rock churches.

In the meantime, the good news is that the Cappadocia section of the current Lonely Planet Turkey was written by an enthusiastic walker. Expect more coverage of the valleys to sit alongside the descriptions of the churches then.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.

PAT YALE (Cihan/Today's Zaman)



 
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