Two days travel: train trips, security checks, two flights, a night in Istanbul, bus journey and two taxi rides. The roads are empty as we drive from the airport through a rocky raspberry ripple landscape: soft pinks and creams whipped into peaks and mounds. We pass boulders with windows and doors. Names that were unknowns on an itinerary reveal themselves as places: Nevsehir, Goreme, Urgup, and finally our destination Mustafapasa. Or is it Sinasos.
Travelling with my collaborator, artist Laura Denning, we have come to talk about rivers, extraction, and lost wolves at the Critical Animal and Plant Studies Conference in Cappadocia, Turkey. Before the conference begins, we have five days to walk this small town and its surrounds.
A sleepy square, a cluster of cafés. A steady stream of local people fill their plastic containers at the central spring. Swifts swoop overhead, sparrows and peach-breasted pigeons splash in the water fountain. Huge pale dogs lie around; they belong to no-one but themselves. They are fed by the human community at feeding points stationed on every street.
The town reminds me of a mouth: pearly teeth, extractions, gaps. Houses and hotels stack up unevenly on steep, white rocks. Each new building is a veneer, covering cool, cave rooms inside. Towards the edge of the village, houses are fewer; the caves are more apparent. Many of these once-inhabited holes have street numbers; a door hangs off its hinges at number thirty-three. The people of Sinasos live alongside ghosts. Everybody in Sinasos wants to tell me of the Greek/Turkish population exchange, but no one does it more poignantly than the terribly translated Cave Hotel noticeboard. It begins like a poem:
SINASOS; A piece of
Sinasos was broken off
with those who broken off
with those who left, and it was rebuilt again by
those who came. Some
still searched for their
homeland…
In 1923, the indigenous orthodox Christian community of Sinasos was forcibly repatriated to Greece on religious grounds. As part of the same operation, Muslims ejected from Macedonia arrived to take up residence in this small town, now re-named Mustafapasa. Rather than move into the homes of the departed, these new residents preferred to build on top of, or squeeze between the empty spaces left behind. The trauma of these events is still evident nearly one hundred years later.
We leave Sinasos to follow streams through winding green valleys. Rocks tower over us like ancient gods. They watch blankly through window-eyes, carved long ago by Neolithic peoples, Hittites, early Coptic Christians. From below, we glimpse the blue paint of fading frescos in abandoned chapels hewn out of the soft stone. The air quivers with scented acacia, thyme, flowering quince, hawthorn, the sounds of orgiastic frogs and sweet nightingale song. This perfumed Persian love song ends abruptly with the sound of roaring engines. We turn a corner and are confronted by eight men on quad bikes. They have driven up the canyon from the opposite direction. One of them is stuck in the stream, splattered mud, tyre tracks and squashed plants everywhere. Laura takes a photograph of the hapless man in the stream. A gleam in her eye, she asks “Do you feel a bit stupid?”
Helen Billinghurst is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her research interests in site, story, movement, memory, materials and ecosophical futures. She makes walks, paintings, drawings, poems, installation, short films, rituals, games, and performance in response to place.
Links
Critical Animal and Plant Studies Conference, Cappadocia, Turkey https://ehc.kapadokya.edu.tr/international-conferences.
Laura Denning website: https://lauradenning.com/
Stuckey, Leigh (2022) ‘Two in one: transnational inheritance and the remaking of the Sinasite houses as shared heritage monuments’. AnthroSource, Museum Antropology, American Anthtopological Asssosiation [online] <https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muan.12245> accessed 31/5/2022.
Sheilds, Sarah (2013) ‘The Greek/Turkish population exchange: internationally administered ethnic cleansing’. Middle East Research and Information Project, [online] <https://merip.org/2013/06/the-greek-turkish-population-exchange> accessed 31/5/2022.