Konya to Kapadokya

We were able to spend less time on the bus today, so that was a nice perk.  Our first stop, as we traveled along the route of the ancient Silk Road, was at Caravanserai Sultanhani. The name "serai" means "inn", so it was once a hotel for the caravans transporting goods along the Silk Road.  Touted as the best caravanserai of the seljuks, it was built in 1229, and after a fire they restored and enlarged it in 1278, making it the largest in Turkey.  It was under renovation during our visit and not incredibly awe-inspiring, but then again, hotels at that time weren't a luxury.  Despite that the carvings and designs in the rock walls were very impressive for such a simple structure.

At our rest stop I finally found a book (in English) on Nasreddin Hodja!  It contains humorous stories of his purported antics, and certainly helps pass some of my time on the bus.

Our next stop was the town of Güzelyurt for a home-cooked meal made by a local woman.  We ate in her home, there were 10 of us in one room and the food was simple, but very tasty and quite filling as well.

Lentil soup, salad, cooked chickpeas with cracked wheat in a sauce, fresh yogurt, and a special cake soaked in honey, topped with a bit of coconut.  Güzelyurt means "beautiful land", and it is known for its underground cities.  Serdar told us that Christians from the 1st Century fled from Caesarea to this region because of persecution under Emperor Domitian. In the interest of truth, there is debate on whether Domitian was actually a great persecutor of Christians.  Anyway, the fact remains that homes were built into the rocks in Cappadocia.

 By the 6th Century the people needed to hide themselves from wandering armies so they dug their cities underground. I've also found out that a historically large native-Cappadocian Greek population existed in the area until the 1924 population exchange when they were replaced with the Turks from Thessaloniki and Kavala.

After lunch we drove about an hour to the Matis Carpet Weaving Village.  The carpet weaving they do here is quite interesting.  The women use a chart, similar to a cross-stitch pattern, to create the rug's design and each of the carpet's threads, whether wool, silk, or cotton, and the dyes used to color them come from Turkey.  They say one of their carpets is in the Guinness Book of World Records (I think for being the most expensive sold at auction or something).

 The carpets can often take 1-2 years to create and they have over 700 knots per square inch!  They explained that you can tell if a carpet is hand-woven by turning it over.  If you can still see the pattern from the back side and you can easily fold it, then the carpet is hand-made.  We also learned that the geometric designs are from the early nomadic days of Turkey's history and the more flowery designs are from the Ottoman period.  The array of carpets was spectacular.  The colors, the patterns, the feel of them under your toes - it was a delight to the senses.  With even the smaller 2ft x 1ft wall hanging carpets costing over $200 I had no intention of making a purchase.  With such time-consuming effort and high quality you had to view them as works of art, hence the hefty price-tag.

My final event of the day was the Whirling Dervishes ceremony.  Performed inside the Saruhan Carevanserai, I found the entire thing a tad odd.  I have so many questions about the whole thing and how it is tied to Sufism ad Islam, etc..  Serdar said it is not a religion, or a sect, but is a philosophy.  The whirling is a kind of meditation, but the enter thing felt very ceremonial to me and I couldn't help but notice that the Caravanserai where they do this "practice" (Semâ) had the same Islamic prophet names on the walls as the ones you see in all the mosques.  According to the pamphlet, "the Semâ ceremony represents an entire mystical journey, a spiritual ascent through love, in which the dervish deserts his ego, finds the truth and arrives as 'The Perfect'".  One of Mevlanâ Rumî's metaphors about wind and the love of God (as paraphrased by Serdar) was quite good: "a soul without the love of GOd is purposeless."

After the meditation ritual we headed outside where they served us hot cherry juice with cinnamon and cloves (almost like a mulled wine) and then projected an animation of the history and culture of Turkey onto the stone walls of the caravanserai.  We eagerly headed back to the warm bus for the short jaunt back to the hotel where we had a quick dinner and rushed off to bed.  We have to be in the lobby at 5:15am tomorrow in hopes that the winds are weaker tomorrow and and our hot air balloon ride isn't cancelled.