This morning we made another attempt at catching a bus. It was reassuring to find four villagers waiting at the spot the bus was said to pass. We chatted with a couple who lived next door to our pension until a car rounded the corner and stopped, picking them up. This is the pattern for Selime – wait for a bus anywhere it passes but if someone comes along, go with them instead. We continued to wait with an elderly couple and followed their example when the minibus came along. It did seem a bit strange that there was a large tool box in with the passengers and no destination on the front of the bus. It was only when we attempted to pay at the end of the trip that we found out that we had been driven by some workmen going to our destination of Guzelyurt for the day.
We had booked into a pension that included dinner so that we would have a special meal (definition: anything that is not bread and salad picnic) for my birthday. The pension was in an old Greek house with stone walls a metre thick. Originally a Christian area and mostly inhabited by people of Greek descent during Otoman times, in 1924 Guzelyurt (then called Gelveri) had an enormous cultural upheaval when there was a mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece. The 1000 Greek families went to Nea Carvali in Greece and Turkish families came from the Greek towns of Kozan and Kastoria to settle in the newly named Guzelyurt. Guzelyurt hosts a Greece/Turkey Friendship Festival each year and many Greek descendents, all able to speak Turkish since their families have kept the heritage alive, return. Imagine the logistics in allocating vacant homes and land to people who had made their whole lives and expectations in another village, also the resentments and adjustments.
Once settled in our room, I gave myself the gift of a snooze – we are always on the go and it was such a luxury to hop into bed in the middle of the day. I woke to birthday phone calls which was wonderful since I had felt more ‘away’ than on any other day.The village of Guzelyurt flows over a hill and peters out into a flat valley where farmlands predominate. It has many buildings attached to dug out sections in the rocky hillside, and most houses are of stone. Most homes have high fences with gates, so, in spite of very close proximity, there was a great degree of separateness. We haven’t seen this anywhere else in our travels except with the very rich in Ancient Epidavros.
As we walked downhill to the valley, we came to the underground village. There was an official tourist sign posting but no ticket box or anyone there. We let ourselves in, entering a room with tunnels off it that could only have been built for midgets or Hobbits. The lighting system fizzed a bit when we turned it on, with only one fluorescent bar providing a faint glimmer. The globes were missing from the rest of the fixtures. Not daunted, we used the lights on our cameras to proceed but at the next room the optional tunnels made us realise that we could get lost down there, doubled over in the dark. We vowed to return with a torch.There are dug out churches along the mountain side and lining the valley. Life goes on around them so to visit one, we crossed into a farmer’s yard, carefully closing the rickety gate behind us, and climbed up the incline.
The residential caves were being used for fodder storage but the tiny church was being respected. It, like all the others, had shocking destruction of frescoes by iconoclasts, Muslims and modern graffitists.
Climbing to the panorama viewpoint and down via a monastery complex on several levels, we met a mother and her three children and two friends. They were tending their pregnant cow that contentedly chewed in a tiny walled paddock for one. They were all very friendly and were keen to have their photos taken, mum included. We obliged and they explained to me that they would give me their address so that I could send them the photo. This was very different to our experience in Egypt when people were keen to be paid to have their photos taken. The ten year old daughter wrote down their address and we had copies of the photos made to send them. We realised that our cameras, which we take so much for granted, were powerful tools to people who may not have access to one.
Next we had a bit of luck with timing because we visited St Gregorios, which is now a mosque, just when the man overseeing the restoration was present. He welcomed us and gave us a tour. The church looks like a large Byzantine or Greek church and was built originally in the 385 AD. 
It was completely rebuilt in the 19th century and then altered again when it became a mosque after the exchange of populations in 1923. Tzar Nicholas the 1st gave beautiful woodwork for the alter rails and it is now used on the walls as decorations. The building currently has white paint over the icons, but the present reconstruction will not extend to uncovering them. It is costing millions of liras to work on the minaret and the residential wing, fix the rising damp and restore other aspects of the interior. We went down the 34 steps in the garden to the water in the ‘purifying well’, huddled down in the gloom. The minaret still contains the bells that were in it when, at a smaller size, it was the bell tower. The church was used for worship since the time of St Gregorio, who, along with St Basil, introduced the idea that religion should be practised within the community, rather than in monasteries etc away from it. Our guide said that people never regularly attended the big church because the little churches allowed them to wear their gold rings, necklaces and bracelets and the big church frowned on such things.We returned to our pension and read and relaxed until tea time. They had made a beautiful meal for us of dolmas, soup, bread, home made macaroni, long thin pastries with cheese and parsley in them and fresh fruit. We shared the meal with a French traveller who recommended the South West of France near Toulouse and the Massif Central as places to hole up in during my intensive language improvement time in the summer.
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