We woke early to watch the balloons fly from the top of Rose Valley panorama point. Too early as it turned out. Wind had blown up the previous morning and stopped any flights, so we waited and waited, and were about to head home thinking that would happen again this morning when finally one balloon floated up, then the rest slowly followed.
There must have been a hundred when they were all aloft. The morning was icy cold so those brave enough to fly must have had on their heavy duty mitts and ear muffs as it would have been brutally cold higher up. The balloons floated slowly over the valley, hanging before our eyes like a hundred coloured Chinese lanterns. One or two dropped down for a thrill into one of the wider gorges near us, but we don’t think conditions must have been perfect today, as most floated down after just 45 minutes.
Superstition is alive and well in Cappadocia. One of our early morning coffee cafes had a spiky thorny concoction hanging in each corner of the shop: a hazar, there for protection from the evil eye. We saw them elsewhere, too. We often saw threaded chickpeas decorating walls and wondered about them. Some are quite complex, threaded like macramé, called Yüzerlik, and are hung to seek protection for the home or shop, with a bonus wish for prosperity.
Gourds are everywhere in Cappadocia and, traditionally, they are emptied and used to store salt, paprika and mint, some of the essentials ingredients in Turkish cuisine. We ran across a gentleman who had no use for gourds. He used recycled plastic jars. His name was Yoğurtçu Baba and he was selling home made yogurt from the boot of his car, parked by the pedestrian crossing. A consummate seller.
We have noticed that Turkish folk sit low for most things. Women often sit to work, we notice. The town of Ortahisar was filled with these low tables and chairs, and the men use them in the çay shops for much of the day. At home, traditional Cappadocians sit on the floor to eat around a large copper tray, with a cloth hanging from it, right around the table. This doubles as a napkin. And eating is quite communal, using spoons from a common dish. Our salads, with every meal we order, are served communally. For çay, later, a family typically moves to one of the divans, which doubles as a bed.
Prior to getting married a traditional Turkish girl collects her trousseau: the linen, napery and special embroidered pieces she collects are placed in her wedding chest, or glory box, as we call it. This is her sandik. There are many in Ortahisar shops for sale. For food storage thorny sticks are often used to string grapes. When these grape-laden sticks are hung in a cave, or a cold room, the fruit can last for months.
Talking of cold storage, when we were driving one afternoon, we saw a sign for ‘Lemons Underground Storage’ and stopped to investigate. Here we discovered that deep in underground caves all over Cappadocia is a massive store of citrus fruit that was grown this season along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It is trucked here to be stored in virtually free cold storage. Hundreds of tons of fruit throughout many of these working caves in Cappadocia. Who would have imagined that?
We were invited in. Women packers were quality checking some of the lemons that had been in cold storage that were now being reboxed and banded, then taken from here in trucks to be shipped out to different areas of Turkey, or exported to the rest of the world. It was dark. It was cold. The smell of moist underground mould hit the back of your throat like an acid sting. The ladies were all rugged up. And all I could think of was mesolethioma.
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