Turkey: Kebabs, Cats, and Crazy Ol’ Christians

Still under a haze of jet lag, we’re sitting in the living room of our Antalya apartment when we see a skinny black cat make a fantastic leap from the patio handrail to the top of the wall-mounted on-demand heating unit. The handrail is only a couple of inches wide and made of smooth, satiny metal, and somehow this cat manages to hurl himself five feet vertically and land in a space that’s only a few inches wide and maybe ten inches high, all while avoiding some pipes and wires along the way. No doubt this is a great nook: high, protected from the elements, warm, and conveniently cat-sized. Smart cat. He has a white chin and chest, and white-tipped paws. Maybe he should be called Sylvester.

The next morning, I open the patio door to check the air temperature, and a black and white fury launches itself from the top of the heating unit, parkours briefly off the handrail and disappears down the walkway and into the bush. Despite this skittishness, he makes regular appearances on our patio over the next few days. One day grooming himself in the corner, another curled up on the table in the sun. He’s even skinnier than I thought, the skeletal anatomy of his hind-quarters visible through his fur. We end up eating out more often than usual during our first week and Turkish restaurants tend to offer plentiful, meaty fare that I can never finish. The fridge has a selection of leftovers, so I find a plastic container and cut up some kofta and kebab for him. He darts off the table and starts to run away as soon as he hears the patio door begin to open. I try to make soothing noises. He’s halfway out of the gate, but perhaps has caught a whiff of the food because he pauses to look back. I put the bowl down. He doesn’t move; he just stares at me. I back away into the house and softly slide the patio door closed. After a moment, he approaches warily, sniffs, then wolfs down the food.

Sylvester and I repeat this feeding ritual once or twice a day over the next few days. I open the door with some food, he runs to the edge of the patio and eyes me with a mixture of suspicion and hope, and only when I back away from the food bowl does he approach. He doesn’t seem to have any desire to get too close to me or receive a gentle scratch on the head. I decide that he is an independent kitty who is too proud to allow himself to be fondled for the sake of a bowl of food. I’m okay with that. This feline hauteur makes me think of the humorous “Henri, le chat noir” YouTube shorts from a decade ago. This cat has the right colouring. Maybe he should be called Henri instead. 

Ulysse is not so fond of Henri initially. He likes his cats a little more sociable. However, a few days after I started feeding Henri, Ulysse pokes his head out the door and meows. Henri blinks in that slow way that cats do when content and meows back. The conversation had begun.

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Henri no longer darts away when I open the patio door, but one time I emerge with a handful of coat hangers on which to hang some laundry. Seeing the mysterious snarl of plastic and metal in my hand, he startles and flees out the gate.

Cats have a special place in Islam, in part due to a story about the prophet Muhammad. The legend goes that Muhammad was about to get dressed for prayer when he found his cat lying on the sleeve of his robe. Rather than disturb the creature, he cut off the sleeve! As a result, cats are often found sunning themselves on chairs at restaurants and are even tolerated in mosques. Apparently, there is no particular mention of cats in the Quran or associated teachings, and the legend might actually predate Muhammad, but it’s a nice story. In our neighbourhood, we’ve seen many little cat cabins and bowls of kibble, and the numerous stray cats seem to be in a lot better shape than those we’ve seen elsewhere in the Mediterranean. However, Henri has made a risky choice: he’s claimed the little patio of this apartment as his own, with its ever-changing guests and their ever-changing beliefs. He’ll never be sure whether the patio door will open to present him with food…or the business end of a broom.

After a couple of weeks in Antalya, with warm days of climbing and swims in the Mediterranean (okay, I swum; Ulysse declines to submerge more than his ankles in water any more than 10°C below body temperature), we decide we need a vacation from our vacation and head to Cappadocia. Now famous for balloon rides and fairy chimneys, Cappadocia has a long and layered history, with rather crazy monks (my opinion) and persecuted Christians leaving the most obvious legacies. Wanting to take it all in, we book a room in a fairy chimney (so cool!) in the town of Göreme and a balloon ride for the morning after we arrive.

Our first evening, we go to a restaurant in a nearby cave and I try one of the local Cappadocian specialties, a stew cooked in a small clay urn that is brought to the table on a bed of flaming coals. The waiter, Mustafa, then dons large fireproof gloves, holds the clay pot in the air, and asks me to whack it with the blunt side of a huge knife. A few good blows, the pot sheers in a clean, horizontal line and I’m rewarded with a delicious lamb stew. 

As the restaurant is not particularly busy and Ulysse and I are the last to leave, Mustafa, who turns out to be the owner, starts chatting with us and brings a sample of his homemade wine. He says that the restaurant is part of a cave complex lived in by his grandparents, but that his parents had moved away to find work in the era before the flood of tourists came. Göreme National Park has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1985, but it seems that Instagram has recently ratcheted-up its appeal so much that it’s now the third-most visited spot in Turkey. What a change the town must have seen in a generation! Almost none of the fairy chimneys are lived in by families anymore—they’ve been taken over by hotels. And it seems that every third business is a tour company advertising balloon flights, horseback rides, ATV rides, and any number of other guided tours (even a ghost tour). Even though I’m part of the problem, I am saddened by this nasty side-effect of rampant tourism. The uniqueness and charm that took centuries to develop are being swiftly eroded by so many identical shops selling identical trinkets, identical tours. It starts to feel like you are at a carnival rather than a real town.  

Mustafa also told us that during the COVID shutdown, he had enlarged one of the dining rooms by a couple of feet and installed fake fireplaces. 

“Everyone wants a photo of themselves in front of a fireplace in Cappadocia,” he says with a shrug. “You don’t have a fireplace? They just leave.” 

After he’d finished the renovations, multiple officials came by to give him grief, from the local police to the UN, threatening fines and legal action. 

“Imagine,” he says, “people have been building whatever they want in these caves for centuries. I enlarge a room by a couple of feet and it’s an international crime!”

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The next morning, our balloon flight is cancelled. One friend had cautioned me about the dubious safety record of ballooning in Cappadocia, while another told a darkly humorous story about taking his whole family, from kids to grandparents, on a balloon flight in France. Upon landing, the basket of the balloon tipped over and the entire family piled up on top of grandma! Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the balloon flights ended up being cancelled due to high winds for the duration of our time in Cappadocia. 

Instead, we spend a lot of time hiking through the strange landscape of the fairy chimneys. They are the work of volcanoes…and a lot of time. Fairy chimneys form when a thick layer of volcanic ash hardens into a porous rock called tuff, which is later topped with a layer of harder rock (basalt in this case). After millennia of erosion, much of the softer tuff wears away while that protected by a cap of basalt remains, forming tall, thin columns. The fairy chimneys are naturally sculpted into fantastical shapes, but in Cappadocia, many also have doors, windows, steps, dovecotes…it’s easy to imagine that you’ve fallen into a Dr. Seuss book.

Not far into our hike in the Rose Valley, curiosity has led us off the main path and we realize that it doesn’t take much to get away from people, you just need to walk a little. We climb up into an old church and are exploring the organic shapes of the rooms when it occurs to me that it is so very quiet: no voices, no road noise, even the birds are rather subdued in their peeping. While I’m staring at the carved crosses on the ceiling and the frescoed walls with their scratched-out faces of Christian saints, the midday call to prayer drifts faintly through the valley, a powerful reminder that the only constant is change. 

Over the centuries, people have cut into the rock to create homes, churches, stables, wineries, and any number of other things, but what I find most fascinating was the bizarre use of fairy chimneys by the Stylite monks during the Byzantine era.

In the early ages of Christianity, asceticism was popular among monks. They believed in the mortification of the flesh: that by suppressing their desires and enduring physical and mental privation, not only would their spirits be closer to God but they would also be spared some of their inevitable suffering in the afterlife. For example, in the 7^th century, St. Gabriel walled himself up for years in an enclosure with a small opening at the bottom through which food could be passed. If he felt he wasn’t being hard enough on himself, he squeezed into a narrow, vertical slit in the wall and spent a month standing up. Others forced their bodies into small cages that were exposed to the elements. One hermit apparently created a suit of animal skins for himself, leaving an opening only for the mouth and nose. He would then stand out in the desert, baking himself in the sun. 

The Stylites, however, seemed to enjoy having a bit of attention while they suffered. The first stylite was Symeon, who initially climbed atop a three-foot pillar to get away from earthly life. Over time, he upsized, finally moving to a 60-foot-tall pillar just outside Antioch, where he stayed for 30 years until he died at age 68. According to Edward Gibbon in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

[Symeon] resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. 

Symeon must have had cachet; many other hermits soon joined him. Based on an account written in the seventh century by John Moschos, 

…all the peaks within view were crowned by stylites, and competition between them was rife: if one was struck by lightning—something that clearly happened with a fair degree of frequency—the electrocuted hermit’s rivals would take this as a definitive sign of divine displeasure, probably indicating that the dead stylite was a secret heretic.

From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple

Visiting these devout, pillar-dwelling lunatics was a popular afternoon’s outing for the wealthy pious citizens of Antioch. It was also conveniently close to the waterfalls of Daphne, where Antony and Cleopatra spent their honeymoon. You could get your dose of religion and then have a nice picnic! 

Stylites normally built themselves towers with a perch or a room on top, but in Cappadocia, the pillars already existed in the fantastical forms of fairy chimneys. All the hermits had to do was carve out a little room at the top.

With tired feet and empty bellies, we decide we’ve had enough mortification of the flesh and find ourselves at the improbably named Topdeck Cave Restaurant. After descending a flight of stairs to a large, underground cave, we are given the choice of sitting at a “normal” table, or at a low table surrounded by cushions. We opt for the cushions. The waiter brings wine and appetizers, and we start to get the hang of sitting on the ground. Ulysse, in fact, is the picture of relaxation: he looks like a sultan, leaning back on the cushions, legs stretched out on the carpet, a glass of wine in one hand. Two women who’ve just arrived choose to sit at a normal table and I joke that they obviously hadn’t seen Ulysse or they’d have picked a low one. We chat with the young American couple sitting on cushions next to us and learn that he has many great stories as he’s just finished a four-month bike trip that began in Portugal. After a few minutes, the two women relocate to the low table on the other side of the young couple and remark, gesturing at Ulysse, “We saw him and decided we wanted to look like that too!”

The two women also live in the US, but remarkably, one had studied math at McGill, my alma mater. Even more astonishing, she and her ex-husband lived in Regina for a few months after graduating, as he’d been offered a job there. It was January 1979 when they arrived. They didn’t have a phone in their apartment, so she used a nearby outdoor payphone to make calls. During one particularly cold period, she said the phone stopped working.

“I tried to dial a number, but the wheel wouldn’t return properly, it just slowly went chck…chck…chck!”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a few months later, when she received a job offer in the United States, she took it.

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After three lovely nights in Göreme, with no balloon rides but many great experiences and too many calories consumed, we made the six-hour drive back “home” to Antalya. 

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Henri appears at the patio door the morning after we return. He looks pitiful. His coat is dishevelled and his tail is particularly dirty looking, perhaps after some extra-greasy dumpster diving. His eyes are running. He gives me a friendly half-blink and sneezes. He looks just like a human who is suffering from a cold: miserable. I retrieve a packet of cat food and empty it into his bowl. This time, his appreciation is unmistakable. He rubs himself against my pant legs and head-butts my hand when I put the bowl down.

Everything changes.

I make a note to buy more cat food.

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