Day 43: Göreme, Cappadocia
We're 300 miles east of Istanbul, at a city called Kayseri. With a population of over a million, its thriving business parks and gleaming new automobile distribution centres are clear evidence that the commercial boom is not confined to Istanbul and the west. This is the heart of Anatolia, the 95 per cent of Turkey that is geographically part of Asia. Its size, both in land and population numbers, would, if accession were to go ahead, make Turkey by far the largest country in the European Union. And this worries a lot of Europeans.
Yet the history of this area links up with the very heart of European culture. In the years after the birth of Christ, Kayseri, then called Caesarea, was where St Paul (born Saul in nearby Tarsus) began to make the first Christian conversions. The province of Cappadocia became the epicentre of the early Christian Church, and core beliefs such as the concept of the Holy Trinity were first formulated here by a group of leading ecclesiastical writers known as the Cappadocian Fathers.
Cappadocia was once a huge area, home to the Hatti and then the Hittites two to three thousand years before Christ. It was known as far back as the reign of King Darius of Persia as Katpatuka, the Land of Beautiful Horses. Now the name refers only to a small area characterised by the weird and wonderful rock formations, some of which I am riding through on a good-tempered grey called Bulu in the company of Hasan Çalci, a local boy from Göreme who studied art and design in Italy and now runs one of the most beautiful of the cave hotels in Cappadocia.
All around us are tall thin pillars of honey-coloured rock which look like giant asparagus spears, or as most people seem to prefer, colossal phalluses. Indeed, so geologically aroused is the scenery that it's popularly known as the Valley of Love.
Not all resemble giant phalluses; there are tall conical shapes, rectangular slabs and thin columns with precarious, table-like basalt caps, eroding much more slowly, perched on top. And behind the rock faces are elaborate troglodyte networks, which often provided refuges for those fleeing religious persecution.
Hasan's hotel in among the rocks is called the Anatolian Houses and every room is carved in a different shape and decorated with carefully chosen local artefacts. It's out of season at the moment and we have the place almost to ourselves. Hasan was born, the son of a carpet weaver, in these caves he's converted. Starting out with just a donkey and an English dictionary, he began to show tourists around.
I ask him how much physical closeness to the Middle East (Syria is little more than 200 miles to the south) affects this part of Turkey.
'Of course we are believing in the same religion,' and here his brow furrows, 'but the mentality of our life is totally, totally different. West has always been more exciting for the Turkish people.'
