The air breathed of men's cologne mixed with the intoxicating benzene as our little motorcycle made its precarious nature down the cobbled pathway across Ortahisar - Ibrahimpasa down towards Goreme.
Our day took us out on a path that charted none of any maps but we would soon find ourselves immersing our fascination with 6th Century-old worth of a ghost town in Cavusin, abandoned in ruins since the great 1960 earthquake. Today, we met a local guide that must had been sent by St. John the baptist himself to help us up the dangerous slopes, musky chambers of former kitchens, mangers and prayer rooms. Mehmet occupied an almost unnoticeable corner of the street carving his talent on the local soft volcanic stones and Cappadocian Obsidian rocks. We were taken on many sites to view the undiscovered sunset, the dusty lanes and an old chimney protruding from the base of an underground home that had seen many previous Christians living here before the great migration began in the return to the Orthodox land or the move to Islam when the Ottoman took over.
Everything seemed rarer and wilder out here in the biting sun. We cut across the dry air like two lovers eloping into the uncharted future as the road took us to villages that still somehow kept their old ways. The yellow of sunflowers mixed in a bewildering collage with the red of tomato fields and fluffy cotton plants while the hydraulic anemone wisps of flowering water pipes showered like swaying ballerinas onto the sandy patches of land that blond-haired kids ran playing in between their wheel barrows, watched over by an intense, quiet grandmother.
Headscarves blew in the warm wind as village women sat in a union exchanging daily gossip while hands kept a vigil at their sewing as a rusty donkey carriage creaked its tired joints up the road towards the basalt mosque. Away from the comfort of the usual suspects, getting past the towns of Mustafapasa, Urgup, Kaymakli and back towards Nevsehir into the valleys of Uchisar was like visiting a group of ancient men, promising you a good story that had been told over the ages.
Just that nobody bothered stopping long enough to listen. If only we took just a minute longer to ponder over that cup of coffee while the senior stones of a Justinian church of the most august kind hovered over your wondering of a question too many, began many years ago.
