(TJ) The second day we took an all day “green tour” trip to see some of the sites around the area, more huge cave monasteries, cities where many people still live in the cliffs and one old city completely underground (Nevsehir Derinkuyu Yeralti Sehri) that they say could have held 10,000 people.
(Michelle) Our guide on the green tour was an entertaining guy who was relatively bored with his job so he made a lot of silly comments to try to make it fun. The green tour is not named such because it is especially environmentally friendly, it is named arbitrarily because there are apparently only two “tours” you can take in Goreme, the Red tour and the Green tour.
On this tour, we saw more of the eye gouged art, so we asked our guide about it. The guide told us that the reason the eyes were scratched out was because of the decorative beliefs of Muslim people (not so much Christian hatred or vandalism). Because Muslim art generally does not include living beings, the best way to make the art “not living” is to get rid of the eyes. I was aware from our Muslim friends about this particular art restriction (no living beings), but as to whether or not this is what is behind the scratching out of the eyes, I would not be totally surprised if our guide was yanking our chain. It seems to me that the better way to take care of this issue is how we see it later in the Ayasofya – where you just tile over the Christian art altogether. Although that might have been too big of a project for a little cave dwelling. Either way, taking out the eyes possibly gets rid of that eerie feeling that someone is watching you, but they still look like living (although somewhat zombified) beings even without their eyes if you ask me.
While on the green tour, we made friends with a nice couple from Perth, Tom and Jane. We ended up going out double date style that night to a really nice Turkish restaurant, drinking wine and raki. It was such a nice time and they were really great people. That is the first night since we left that we have spent that kind of money on a meal, an extra special treat. I don’t have any pictures of the green tour day because they accidentally got deleted. :(
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