{"id":102323,"date":"2023-10-15T13:41:30","date_gmt":"2023-10-15T19:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=102323"},"modified":"2023-10-19T23:24:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T05:24:00","slug":"kaymakli-and-goreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2023\/10\/kaymakli-and-goreme.html","title":{"rendered":"Kaymakl\u0131 and G\u00f6reme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/a>
In the \u201cunderground city\u201d at Kaymakl\u0131 \u00a0 (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We held a sacrament service this morning at our hotel in \u00dcrg\u00fcp.\u00a0 It was very enjoyable.\u00a0 Steve Densley conducted it, and Murat \u00c7ak\u0131r, who served as the branch president and in the mission presidency here for quite a while (and who currently teaches Sunday school), was our speaker.\u00a0 (More on that, perhaps, later.) \u00a0Brother \u00c7ak\u0131r helped us to organize this trip, and he and his wife, Susan, have been traveling with us.\u00a0 \u00a0At least four Muslim members of the hotel staff, three women and a man, sat right outside the door of the room where we met, listening and watching with surprisingly rapt attention.\u00a0 I wonder what they made of it.\u00a0 (Our congregational singing was pretty good, I think.)<\/p>\n
A quartet that included two physicians who happen to be former members of the Tabernacle Choir, David Palmer and Brian Hales, sang \u201cBrightly Beams the Father\u2019s Mercy.\u201d\u00a0 The other two members of the quartet were Steve Densley, the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s executive vice president, and, well, the president of the Interpreter Foundation.\u00a0 Desperate times call for desperate action.<\/p>\n
In thinking about \u201cBrightly Beams the Father\u2019s Mercy,\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but be reminded of parody lyrics that I heard on my mission in Switzerland.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know who composed them.\u00a0 (Is anybody else familiar with what follows below?)\u00a0 They include many of the responses that we commonly heard while out tracting and knocking on doors:<\/p>\n
\n
Tue recht und scheue niemand.<\/p>\n
Es ist wirklich alles gleich.<\/p>\n
Jeder wird nach seiner Fassung<\/p>\n
Selig werden im Himmelreich.<\/p>\n
Alle Wege f\u00fchr\u2019n nach oben<\/p>\n
Und ich habe keine Zeit.<\/p>\n
Ich bin doch schon evangelisch<\/p>\n
Und ich bleib\u2019s in Ewigkeit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
For which I offer my hasty and unpoetic translation:<\/p>\n\n
Do what\u2019s right and fear nobody.<\/p>\n
Every (religion) is really just the same.<\/p>\n
Everybody will be saved in the Kingdom of Heaven<\/p>\n
According to his convictions.<\/p>\n
All paths lead to heaven,<\/p>\n
And I have no time.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I\u2019m already an Evangelical<\/p>\n
And I\u2019ll remain so for eternity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019ve made two attempts at suicide during the trip thus far.\u00a0 Both occurred on the same day:\u00a0 First, I brushed my teeth with hydrocortisone instead of toothpaste.\u00a0 It tasted terrible, and then I actually looked at the squeezable tube that my wife had placed by the sink and recognized the, umm, inconvenient truth.\u00a0 Scrubbing and rinsing out my mouth became much more urgent than they had been just before.\u00a0 Then, at lunch that day, I sampled just a bit of a Turkish jalape\u00f1o pepper\u2014the hottest I have ever tasted.\u00a0 It took easily ten minutes to stop feeling the pain.<\/p>\n
The internet in our hotel for the past two nights was only good in the reception area, but terrible in our room.\u00a0 I mentioned it to one of our traveling companions. \u00a0\u201cWhat?\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cAre you living in some kind of a cave?\u201d\u00a0 Well, as a matter of fact, I was.\u00a0 And it turns out\u2014who knew?\u2014that meter-thick limestone isn\u2019t a good medium for wireless internet.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/a>
Inside the \u201cDark Church\u201d (Karanl\u0131k Kilise) in Cappadocia, G\u00f6reme, T\u00fcrkiye
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Republic of Turkey occupies the Anatolian Peninsula and a bit of territory beyond it.\u00a0 But have I commented yet on the word Anatolia?\u00a0 It derives from the Greek word \u1f08\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bb\u03ae(anatole, pronounced approximately a-na-toe-LAY) which means \u201cthe East;\u201d more generally, anatole denotes anything to the east of the person using the word, or simply, vague \u201ceastern regions.\u201d\u00a0 It refers to the direction where the sun rises; the Greek word \u1f00\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u03ad\u03bb\u03bb\u03c9 (anatello) means \u201cI rise up.\u201d\u00a0 In the Nativity story at Matthew 2:1-2, the \u201cwise men\u201d are said to have come to Jerusalem \u201cfrom the east\u201d (\u1f00\u03c0\u1f78 \u1f00\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bb\u1ff6\u03bd; apo anatolon), having seen the miraculous star \u201cin the east\u201d (\u1f10\u03bd \u03c4\u1fc7 \u1f00\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bb\u1fc7; en te anatole).<\/p>\n
We went this morning to the underground city of Kaymakl\u0131, a rabbit warren of rooms and storage areas that was cut from the rock on eight different levels.\u00a0 To this point, and to the best of my knowledge, thirty-six of these \u201cunderground cities\u201d have been found in Cappadocia.\u00a0 (Depending on how you count them, the one in Derinkuyu has between eighteen and twenty floors, with a capacity for about 20,000 people.)\u00a0 One theory has it that the first two or three levels in each of them were excavated by the ancient Hittites, with the Christians of the sixth and seventh centuries AD creating the rest of the floors.\u00a0 There is no natural light in them, and it\u2019s difficult to envision people willingly staying in them on a permanent basis.\u00a0 So, many think that they were places of emergency refuge, or even merely storage areas.\u00a0 But that last hypothesis can\u2019t seem to explain the elaborateness of the \u201ccities.\u201d<\/p>\n
They are a bit difficult to navigate, especially for someone who is relatively tall (as I am).\u00a0 With characteristic nobility, though, and thinking only of others who would eventually pass the same way, I sought to extend the height of some of the rock tunnels by means of my head.\u00a0 The resultant bleeding gained me a fair amount of sympathy, including that of three Muslim women at the end, who expressed their heartfelt concern and best wishes.\u00a0 Perhaps there should be a variation at the entrance of one of those Disneyland or Disney World signs:\u00a0 \u201cYou must be at least this short to enter the underground city.\u201d<\/p>\n
From Kaymakl\u0131, we drove to the Uranos restaurant, a vast and curious complex that has been carved into a limestone hillside.\u00a0 Despite the busloads of customers who were there, the food was actually quite good.<\/p>\n
Next, we entered G\u00f6reme National Park and, specifically, the G\u00f6reme Open Air Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is famous for its chapels carved into the rock, and for their tenth- or eleventh-century frescos depicting the life of Christ.\u00a0 Walking up into the hills, you see more than a dozen chapels and other buildings.<\/p>\n
This evening, we drove by U\u00e7hisar Castle in the Nev\u015fehir Province of Cappadocia.\u00a0 It\u2019s actually a 60-meter-high rock formation that is pockmarked by caves and crisscrossed by numerous underground passageways and rooms, now mostly blocked or impassable.\u00a0 In Byzantine times, the place was home to perhaps around 1,000 people.\u00a0 (Nobody lives in it now.) \u00a0The view from it is said to be remarkable.\u00a0 Deep ravines and gulleys and rock outcroppings have been shaped by the wind and the weather into pyramids, cones, and towers of every size and shape.\u00a0 As has sometimes been said, the landscape is worthy of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Brueghel the Elder.\u00a0 One of the \u201cfairy chimneys\u201d that can be seen from atop U\u00e7hisar actually houses a jandarma, a police station. \u00a0\u00a0We stopped just past it for photographs, just when the evening sun had painted it in bright light.<\/p>\n
We will be flying early tomorrow morning to Izmir, the ancient Smyrna (reputed birthplace of the great Greek epic poet Homer), and we will be spending the night nearby, in Ku\u015fadas\u0131. (Remember that the cedilla, the little squiggle, at the bottom of the Turkish letter c turns that letter\u2019s normal j sound [as in jam or jello] into a ch sound [as in church], and, appended to the bottom of an s, makes that letter into a sh sound [as in sheesh and shout].\u00a0 And that the dotless i\u2014that is, the letter \u0131\u2014is pronounced as a fairly dull uh sound.\u00a0 So Kaymakl\u0131 is pronounced roughly Kay-MAK-luh and Ku\u015fadas\u0131 is pronounced Koo-SHAD-uh-suh (and not KOO-sa-DAA -see, as I\u2019ve often heard tourists say the word, leaving me to wonder sometimes how the Turks even know what they\u2019re talking about).<\/p>\n
True story:\u00a0 I was once walking along a sidewalk in a coastal town not far from San Diego.\u00a0 Somebody pulled up in a really expensive car and demanded to know if I could direct him and his passengers to LAH-jah-lah.\u00a0 I honestly had no idea, and I told him so.\u00a0 It was only after he had driven away that it dawned on me that he must have been referring to La Jolla(which is, of course, pronounced roughly la-HOY-uh).\u00a0 By then, it was too late to catch up with him.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Kayseri, Cappadocia, T\u00fcrkiye<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 We held a sacrament service this morning at our hotel in \u00dcrg\u00fcp.\u00a0 It was very enjoyable.\u00a0 Steve Densley conducted it, and Murat \u00c7ak\u0131r, who served as the branch president and in the mission presidency here for quite a while (and who currently teaches Sunday school), was our speaker.\u00a0 (More on that, perhaps, later.) 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