Kapadokya (Cappadocia) Part 4

The next day I wake up in a cave with pictures on my camera holding a rifle and someone else's rental car parked outside.

After more of Jacky's breakfast and coffee we jump in the car, pick up the owners (who turn out to be our French friends from Bursa) and drive to another extraordinary phenomenon of Kapadokya. Beneath the villages, caves and fairy chimneys is a network of three underground cities. We drive through barren winter plains to Derinkuyu, where our guide, Mehmet, illuminates the sometimes desperate, mostly hopeful and always ingenious lives of the ancient troglodytes. In times of invasion, and in Turkey there were many, the people of this land would descend into a world unto itself. Down here in the deep black depths, despite the lack of sunshine and ensuing skin problems, the townsmen were able to live up to 6 months at a time and fend off bulky-armored warriors, who would otherwise decimate the population. No invaders ever took the entire city.

Not only a haven for defense, this was a fully functional town, complete with classrooms, churches with corridors designed as a cross, a morgue where bodies were hoisted out through vertical tunnels, a well, a winery, a torture chamber, false tunnels to deceive the enemy and a ventilation system where any smoke would immediately find its way to the surface. There was even a wedding tunnel, where the bride and groom would run in and out 7 times and be married. Then the lucky couple would head to the "honeymoon suite," a romantic little hole, where a donkey would be tied up nearby, whose breath provided cozy warmth.

But alas! that is a time long gone and for warmth and comfort tonight, we head to the hamam. The sweat, the humidity, the vapors, the splashing water, the man scrapes big black slivers of dead skin from my entire body, a big belly behind his stocky arms muscles out the tension from my spine. I lay swallowed on the hot marble by a big cloud of bubbles. Rinsing off with tin bowls and sitting down on a lawn chair with some tea and candles, my entire skin is as soft as the ass I was born with.

My thoughts leave my body on that chair in central Turkey where rocks have been massaged by time and elements to create a visual wonderland with hotels, clubs and gift shops sprouting from the foot of the canyon to support and lavish its visitors. Here, a man and a woman haul their relationship to further explore it, inevitably continuing their life sagas and their chapters together. The rocks and people and wine and cold winds pound upon their worlds affecting it as they will. In turn, I can sleep here wondering how the elements, the people, and the rocks are shaping us.