At home and abroad

To squeeze the maximum fun into your birthday, here’s a handy tip: set your alarm for 3 in the morning! This will increase the amount of time you have to celebrate. If you happen to be in Cappadocia, as I was, you can be picked up by a van that will take you to a hot-air-balloon launch site. If the weather is cooperative, as it is for more than half the year, you can clamber into a basket holding 22 people and rise above one of the weirder landscapes on earth. After the ride, you can fill the remainder of the day with other amazing activities.

It’s a good thing Tuesday (May 31) was my birthday. I’m pretty sure Steve wouldn’t have agreed to that program otherwise. He’s not 100% convinced hot air balloon rides anywhere are safe. But deeming the Turkish experience to be a birthday wish, he acceded to it and afterward acknowledged that even he liked it.

It’s very exciting to watch so many giant balloons taking shape in the dim light before dawn; to be in the thick of them as they slowly rise and jockey for air space.I had expected the major payoff of this experience to be the view of Cappadocia’s famous rock formations — towering stone columns formed by the action of wind and water on soft volcanic ash deposits and known locally as “fairy chimneys.” (They reminded us of the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon.) The views were extraordinary.But even more wondrous was the sight of so many hot air balloons in every direction.Ballooning only began here about 30 years ago, but powered by images on social media sites, it has burgeoned in the last decade or so. Our pilot Tuesday said more than 150 balloons carrying a couple thousand people now fly here more days than not.

After the ride, Steve and I napped for a few hours and ate breakfast back at our hotel, built in a renovated cave house. For millennia, humans have been carving churches and monasteries and dwelling places into the soft gray stone that makes up most of the Cappadocian terrain. Some were carved into the fairy chimneys; others into the hillsides.

An enterprising 34-year-old local named Ramazan Ilgezdi a few years ago converted one of those private homes into the hotel where we stayed.

Before doing that, Ramazon worked for years as a master ceramicist. During the pandemic, he also got his credentials to guide tourists. So it was Ramazan who drove Steve and me around for several hours after breakfast to some of the area highlights.

I won’t try to describe all we saw and did, just the one that left us slack-jawed: our visit to one of Cappadocia’s underground cities. More than 30 that have been found throughout Anatolia. Begun by the Hittites around 3000 BC, these subterranean marvels enabled women and children to hide out while their menfolk were fending off invaders — a bit like bomb shelters, but incomparably more sophisticated than anything any American ever dreamed of during the 50s. The one we visited (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) extended down seven levels, a vast labyrinth that experts think accommodated between 5,000 and 30,000 people and included a mind-boggling array of elements necessary to support months-long stays: areas for storing food and livestock…

… areas for cooking and wine-making and accessing clean water, worshipping and processing wastes, honoring the dead, communicating with the floors above or below one.

The underground refugees protected all this with an ingenious system of giant stone disks that could be rolled into place, behind which a single plucky woman with a spear could hold off a marauding horde.

For my birthday dinner, we ate in a restaurant specializing in Turkish “ravioli.” It was delicious, like most of what we consumed. But what I remember most about that evening was our pre-dinner outing to a restored caravansary.

The old Silk Road ran through Cappadocia, down what’s now the unprepossessing strip of highway you see in this photo:

Back in the 1200s, however, traders with their camel trains followed this route to bring spices and other goods from India to Istanbul (from whence all the merchandise could be carried onward into Europe.) Along the way they stopped in caravanseries — lodgings usually built around a courtyard where the caravans could stop to rest. One of them outside the town of Avanos in Cappadocia has been beautifully restored and hosts nightly demonstrations of the whirling dervish religious ceremony.

Dervishes, also known as Mevlevis, are Sufi Muslims who follow the teachings of the 13th century Persian poet and mystic, Rumi. Their ritualistic whirling surely ranks among the most beautiful meditative practices. What Steve and I witnessed Tuesday night may have been part show, but it nonetheless felt solemn and serious. The dervishes entered, wrapped in black cloaks that symbolize death; the tall hats they wear represent the dancers’ tombstones. Someone chanted verses of the Koran, then after a while, the men shed their gloomy outer gear to reveal pristine white jackets and full skirts. To plaintive music produced on a stringed instrument, a wooden pipe, and drums, they slowly began to twirl, skirts undulating out around them in waves. One by one, their arms floated upward, above faces soft with ecstasy.

What it all meant from a theological perspective, I can’t say. But it seemed somehow symbolic of my day, of this whole trip: a dizzying whirlwind that spun me up with happiness.