playing with pencil

Lately I've gone back to basics with my sketching, working only in pencil. My goal is to focus on value, to practice with light and shadow. I feel that my drawings and paintings need a lot more contrast.



Now this surprised looking fellow above is not a study in value, but a quick note of the fresco of St. Theodore from the Chapel of St. Basil in Göreme. I wasn't allowed to take a photograph of his wonderful expression, so I stood among the circulating horde of tourists and did my best to capture it.



One of the subjects I tend to run away from drawing or painting is moving water. Here I've tried to get a sense of the crashing waves of the Atlantic, somewhere on the coast of Portugal. It's not that great, but I like the waves in the lower right side. I'm forever telling my students to face their challenges and work through them, and it's time I took my own advice.

Must keep practicing!

night fell on avanos

the monk's valley

Like pious monks in peaked caps, rushing off to vespers.

the rose valley

Even though at times it felt like we were hiking on another planet without a soul in sight, it was inevitable that we would run into someone selling çay— after all, even the volcanoes in Turkey have a çaycı. This man had something even better: fresh pressed pomegranate juice, and a cave church.



The Haçlı Kilise is home to some fine 9th Century frescoes and a large cross carved into its stone ceiling. Unfortunately, like many of the early Christian frescoes across Turkey, the faces within reach have been scratched out, though you can still make out some sideways glances and stern expressions.



Actually, this was one of the better preserved churches outside of the Göreme Open Air Museum, and the artists' choice to use a malachite green for parts of the background made it quite special.



On our loop back to where we left our car, an unassuming pointed rock with a rickety wooden foot bridge promised something interesting inside. There was a green mashallah in Arabic script with simple botanical patterns decorating the pigeons' entrances to the cave.



Carved straight out of the rock itself, the Kolonlu Kilise is truly impressive. That high vaulted ceiling supported by all those columns... I am still at a loss for words.



Here I felt I had been swallowed by a whale, its ribs expanding and contracting above my head:

the red valley

secrets hidden in caves

The Göreme Open Air Museum has some of the loveliest cave churches in Cappadocia; two of the most famous being the Elmalı Kilise, or Apple Church (pictured above), and the Karanlık Kilise, the Dark Church (below). The vivid frescoes of the Apple Church date back to the 11th and 12th Centuries, and the intense, highly detailed scenes depicted in the Dark Church were painted during the end of the 12th Century. Imagine a small gathering of people in these spaces, worshiping under the stern gazes of saints illuminated by candlelight— imagine the artists and the architects carving arches and columns out of stone, painting in the little light that a cave allows.



Waves of tourists from all corners of the globe look up at those same saints, now bathed in electric light.

salt dough and tacky daggers

It sounds like a great idea: a clay pot is filled with meat and veggies, then sealed with a lump of salt dough and thrown into a fire where everything simmers in its own juices. The pot is dramatically hacked open sometime later to reveal a steamy stew which you can then enjoy with some buttery pilaf. Naturally, the unusual Testi Kebabı is one of the touristy must-haves when visiting Cappadocia, and typical of dishes marketed to tourists, the kebabs we ate in Göreme left much to be desired. I did however, delight in the ridiculously tacky dagger that our waiter produced for cracking open our pots.



It wasn't bad, mind you, just overpriced and bland. While waiting for our coffee, Pedro felt the need to express the horrors of having to share a small sofa with me— I assure you he is not being truthful:



Ah, married life!

caravanserai

The sun had long since sunk below the horizon and though it was early evening, winter had turned the sky an inky black. It was an enticing word in a small font on a tourist map that set us upon the Aksaray-Nevşehir road: caravanserai. Caravanserais were situated along trade routes (the most famous being the Silk Road), where the large complexes could offer travelling merchants and their animals a place to rest, safe from bandits.

It was something we couldn't possibly miss— a ghostly, imposing portal rising high from a crumbling village on the side of a lonely stretch of road. The Ağzıkarahan Caravanserai was built between 1231–1239 CE, its entrance ornate with Seljuk patterns expertly carved in stone. Were it not for the headlights of our car, its beauty would be lost in the darkness. I pushed my camera with a desperate hope that it could capture some sense of what was before me— inevitably, its flashes coaxed a short, bent figure out from the shadows, who asked if we wanted to have the massive door unlocked.



For five lira he handed us a pair of weak plastic torches and welcomed us inside a pitch-black open space, walled in by structures I couldn't quite make out. The light from my torch barely reached my feet, and I moved with a slight tremble, aware of my propensity to walk into walls, fall off things, and generally injure myself. Curious about the construction of the caravanserai, I began to take photos blindly, the flash briefly illuminating arches and a small mescit. It felt like the beginning of a horror film, when the unsuspecting tourist suddenly catches a ghoulish figure in the background of a photo...



Imagine this nearly forgotten space alive with the shuffling of camels, donkeys, and horses, the conversations and tales of travellers floating up into the night; fires lighting, heating, cooking— the smell of animal and of supper.