Hmm. That’s not quite what I’d thought when I’d opened my doors a few days before and found my courtyard knee-deep in snow. This was a first for me. In the 13 winters I’ve passed here, the snow has sometimes reached as high as the top of my boots, but knee-deep? This was new, and for a brief moment I wondered how I was going to get to the gate before I realized that I could push a stiff brush ahead of me to carve out a path to the shed with the shovel in it.
Just goes to show, though, that one woman’s nightmare climatic conditions are another woman’s holiday dream come true. And I can certainly relate to that after a week spent in Turkey’s frozen northeast in search of snow wrestlers and sleighs on ice, while all around me roads were closing faster than the snow could fall, and hoteliers were slumping into cold-induced gloom. As the sleigh clattered out on the ice, I had a silly grin all over my face, and as we stood in the snow to sing the national anthem at the snow wrestling, I felt myself as happy as a sandboy (or should that be snowboy?). Against all the odds, mission accomplished. It was a great feeling.
But I doubt many of the residents of Kars, Şavşat or Ardahan felt as I did then, any more than I was able to share in my friend’s glee over the snow in Göreme. There they were, teetering in slow motion over the ice-encrusted pavements, just as I now had to do in Nevşehir to get the shopping done. No, I can’t come to Avanos, I texted back. Don’t want to risk any broken bones.
Later, I rang my friend Ali. “Was this how it was in your childhood?” I asked him since neighbors had often indicated with a chopping motion across their knees that the snow had been much deeper in the past. Then, I’d assumed they were indulging in a bit of artistic license, but his answer was emphatic: “Of course. Now you’re experiencing the real Cappadocian winter.”
“My grandfather’s sister used to walk about in eight layers of clothes in winter. She was quite thin really, but she looked enormous,” another friend told me. On the dolmuş to Nevşehir, what struck me most forcefully was how few of the older village women own a proper winter coat. Instead, they merely pile on another cardigan and, perhaps, a brown plaid shawl and a white overscarf before stepping out to brave the elements.
How they can bear it, I don’t know. Me, I’ve been favoring the Michelin-woman layered look for weeks now. Never has the thermal vest/thermal long johns combo looked as appealing as it has this year. And thank heavens for my Cotton Traders, a pair of half-rubber/half-suede boots lined with sheepskin that a friend sent me from England a few years ago. They’re hideously ugly, but I’ve been wedded to them all winter, and it’ll be a few weeks yet before they’re stowed away again for next year.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
PAT YALE