goreme gozleme

A perfect, orange crescent moon hangs above the Blue Mosque, harmonising with the warm glow of the lights that circle the minarets and spell out the message 'Dunya ahiretin Tarlasidir': sow in this world, reap in paradise. Before electricity they used to write these Ramadan messages in hundreds of little oil lamps suspended between the minarets, and I imagine they gave off a similar yellow-orange glow. Islam's crescent originated here in Istanbul, when the goddess Hecate was credited with thwarting an attempted seige by Philip of Macedon in 340BC*, and to show their gratitude the Istanbullus took her symbol as their standard. Tonight, in a moment of confusion, I read that sliver of moon unconsciously as both the thing itself and the symbol that has been made of it, and it feels like the old gods and the new are blessing this place, and all of us in it.

In my last two days in Istanbul I walked through the streets of the bazaar district cracking the freshest pistachios I've ever tasted, scattering their shells. I had a kip in the emerald grass of the Suleymaniye Mosque courtyard, then wrapped up my hair, stepped out of my shoes, and went inside. The deep carpet under your bare feet and the dome covering you from above make mosques feel so clean and open but so enveloping. In the Suleymaniye I knelt down for a moment to get a better photo of some detail or other, sat back naturally on my ankles, and instantly felt that I could have stayed there in that attitude all day. I remembered a Turkish girl's account of a visit to this mosque during Ramadan, the spellbinding sense of time suspended, the way she found herself swaying to the rhythm of the chanted prayers, as if 'no false note, no discordant gesture was possible.' I've been reading for three years about this city, about the training of the eunuchs and concubines and jannisaries at the Seraglio, about the political forment that focussed around the rival teams of charioteers in the Byzantine hippodrome (an odd prefiguring of football hooliganism, maybe), about the debauched tastes and murderous plots of the emperors, empresses and sultans. But that half hour in the Suleymaniye Camii, in a travel-tired, belly-troubled stupour (come on--of course I have the runs) was the closest I came to the dreamy city I have found in books.

I visited the Seraglio, all impressive state pavilions and warrens of lavish private quarters, and it made the palaces of France look squat, mean and unlivable by comparison. I talked for half an hour with a tile merchant in the Grand Bazaar. he told me that the best tiles, from Izmir, contain 85% quartz. Their white has the blue-white translucency of an eye. Only one artisan in the world can fashion this material into actual vessels, as opposed to flat tiles, and he turns out 30 or 40 desirable articles a year. Each colour must be fired seperately, and every vase, bowl or tile takes seventy days to produce. The Seraglio, along with many of the finer mosques, is fairly coated with the stuff. I found those hypnotically-patterned rooms more impressive than all the apricot-sized diamonds and rubies in the royal treasury. Not that I'd turn one of those down if it was offered to me in the spirit of friendship, obviously.

Last night I took a night bus to Cappadocia. We tried to watch the Premiership League on the in-bus telly, but the signal kept flickering out. It would cut to black for a few crucial minutes, and when the signal came back the stadium would be wildly celebrating a goal, or some player would be up-yoursing the ref over some disagreement we hadn't see. We slept, kind of, stopped at Ankara for a 4 am kebab (no thanks) and in the morning we were in another world. There were the salt lakes of Western Anatolia (those so delicate but so intense colours! I remember them, oddly, from the country around the salt lakes of West Australia. The lemon yellow, apple green, flossy pink, god knows where these colours come from) and then the fairy chimneys and soft, ripply dovecotes of volcanic ash that everyone knows from postcards.

I arrived in Goreme, had a shower, a swim in the hotel pool, and the best breakfast I've yet had in Turkey (which is really saying something) and then, well, napped all afternoon actually. At seven o'clock I scrambled up to sunset ridge to see what I'd been ignoring all day. Turned out, I'd been napping in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Towers upon towers, squat and slender, soft-serve-whipped ridges of whitest rock, a million pinks and greens in the escarpment to the east, and to the south a lone mountain changing from purple to blue to deeper blue as the sun does its disappearing act. Call me Lady Muck. Hand me a ripe, glowing fig and let me weigh it in my palm a minute while I look out over some landscape of unearthly gorgeousness and noncholantly bargain down the price of my dinner. Because that's how I roll. Until the holiday ends, anyway.

*Istanbul has seen many seiges, most of them not successful but a few spectacularly so. The Byzantines held out for a long time against the navies of Mehmet II by the simple but ingenious means of stringing a chain across the entrance of the Golden Horn just above water level. He trumped them, and thus converted Istanbul to Ottoman rule, by greasing 10 kilometres of road with pig fat and hauling his warships overland to a relatively undefended point beyond the chain. This patch of earth and water has always been a much contested and desired place.