Comparative Quince Orchards

(all photos by Mary Hunter)

We started the next day in Cappadocia at the Göreme Open Air Museum. I wouldn't go so far as to say it has surpassed Ankara's Museum of Anatolian Civilizations to become my favorite museum in the world. I don't even know where to rank it on that scale, as it is so unlike any museum I have ever been in. It exists in a different category. But Booker agreed that it is now his favorite museum in the world, which counts for a great deal.

In terms of curatorial imposition, it might be the most minimalist museum I have ever seen. The museum is a complex of early Christian and Byzantine cave churches, monasteries and tombs, hewn from the volcanic cliffs. There are a few from St Basil's day, in the third century AD, including an old refectory, where a stone table and stone benches are carved directly out of the floor of the cave. The majority of the complex was created later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, or expanded and refined in eleventh century renovations to the third century original.

Beyond a few plaques, security guards, turnstiles and one of the cleanest and most welcoming public bathrooms you are likely to find in Turkey, there is really no modern museum apparatus. The museum exists to protect, display and charge entrance fees to the caves.

In that regard, it is somewhat like the Anasazi cliff-dwellings at Canyon de Chelly or Mesa Verde (speaking only of the physical site, not the religious elements).  But I find the natural setting here even more stunning, a canyon that encloses and shelters the churches like an enormous, multi-tiered amphitheater.

The odd thing is that the logic of what is in and out of the museum seems arbitrary. I suppose Marcel Duchamp made the same point more than a century ago, but it seems even more striking here, where there are several more cave churches directly across the road. As they are outside the museum gates, there is no entrance fee of twenty Turkish lira, but also no preservation, and those closest to the road are littered with bottles, cans and crumpled cigarette packs.

Just over the ridge lie even more treasures. You can't hike half a minute without running across another cave, and in this part of Cappadocia many of those caves were clearly once churches. Their half-crumbled apses and remnants of their Byzantine frescos remain to tell the tale.

We hiked down the Kılıçlar Trail, through a ravine so narrow that at points we had to shimmy through with one foot on each wall. Coming out of the mouth of the ravine, we found ourselves in a sun-dappled quince orchard, with a vast cave complex climbing the hill to the right.

From now on, I will experience cognitive dissonance whenever I traverse the exurban sprawl of Quince Orchard Rd in upper Montgomery County. The quince orchard in Kılıclar has naves in caves. Quince Orchard in Gaithersburg has ladies in Mercedes.

We spent most of the afternoon there, watching the boys scramble up and down the sloping cliffs, their constant mumbling dialogue broken only by the occasional sound of Mary urging, "Boys, don't break the antiquities."