The Church of the Virgin Mary in Kaya, Turkey’s so-called “ghost village”, was gently shedding its plasterwork. It fell in plumes and tiny chunks from the high interior to cover the floor in a thin dust. All across this hillside settlement of some 2,000 buildings, a flourishing town in its time, the combined effect of nesting birds, rain and bleaching sun had been taking its toll since Kaya was abandoned in movingly shameful circumstances some 80 years ago. Outside, the only sound was the scrape of a tortoise bottoming its undercarriage on the poppy-choked lane’s high cobbles.
A sense of melancholy is what you expect at Turkey’s numerous ruin sites — Graeco-Roman cities such as Ephesus and Perge, Ottoman citadels, Byzantine basilicas — but nowhere is it more affecting than at Kaya, formerly known as Levissi by its Greek Christian majority. Unlike most such sites, where the history is ancient, Kaya was abandoned within living memory.
It was from this town of some 6,000 people that the Christians were forcibly deported when Turkey and Greece agreed to exchange their religious minorities in the 1920s. These momentous, tragic events, though they are little known in the West, marked nothing less than the end of a Christian presence in Anatolia that dates back to the missionary journeys of St Paul.
THE FORGOTTEN story of Kaya’s abandonment has resurfaced with a vengeance with the publication in 2004 of Louis de Bernières’s long-awaited epic novel Birds without Wings, which is set in the town in the years leading up to the exchanges.
Kaya seems largely unaware of its celebrity, which means that development as a sophisticated heritage experience looks unlikely for the time being. The ruins boast nothing approaching an interpretive centre, nor a guidebook, and the self-styled museum is a sales room for a range of plaster-cast shepherdesses. Tickets (£1.50 each) are sold from a rickety table that the site guardian sets up every morning outside the church, as if he were presiding over an old-fashioned polling station.
He was not yet up when I arrived after an early breakfast. Among the ruins, where visitors are free to wander at will, I encountered only an old man milking a goat. The elements had stripped the whitewash from the exterior walls of the houses, the grey stone and render streaked momentarily blue by passing jays. The roofs had disappeared, the tiles and timber scavenged by Turks to furnish their smallholdings in the adjacent Kaya Valley. Inside the hillside, shells, fig, acacia and pine trees grew. Alcoves, hearths rising to ornate chimney stacks and faded blue paint survived to evoke the lives of their one-time inhabitants. The atmosphere of loss and desolation was palpable: it was easy to see what had inspired de Bernières.
I looked across the valley, a patchwork of olive groves, pine woods and low-walled smallholdings; the departing Greeks must have felt an added injustice at the fact that they were being expelled from paradise. An exceptionally beautiful place (though the authorities would do well to institute effective building controls without delay), the Kaya Valley has become increasingly popular with holidaymakers on the hunt for country accommodation in a tranquil rural setting. It’s an Anatolian Umbria, a haven for bird life and spring flowers, complete with a scattering of open-air village restaurants where meals are taken on wooden divan platforms shadowed by fig trees.
I was staying at the irresist-ibly rustic Beatrix Cottage, which John and Bea Laughland restored after moving to the valley in 1991. One day, we looked in on their 95-year-old neighbour, Aysenina. She lives alone in a rickety cottage, and reckons she was 14 when the Greeks were ordered to leave. In her front room sits an old wedding trunk carved with a floral motif that represents her link to a momentous past. It had belonged to her Greek friend Maria, who left it to Aysenina when she went into exile. Aysenina doesn’t know what happened to Maria, only that the years have passed, and the chest now stores her own funeral shroud.
I OFTEN returned to the ruins, mostly in the cool of the evening, when I could smell the thyme and oregano underfoot.
I explored the barrel-vaulted chapels, found the remains of the school and peered into broken water cisterns that were topped by stone mosaics. Outside one church, I found an empty ossuary; it was from here that the Greeks had supposedly removed the bones of their loved ones to accompany them into exile.
There is no question that Kaya is uniquely evocative, but it has acquired a particular significance of late as a place where Christians and Muslims once lived peacefully alongside each other. With de Bernières’s novel, this standing memorial to a more harmonious time is guaranteed a new influx of visitors. The hope is that its unique atmosphere — of natural beauty and moving historical resonance — can somehow be preserved. “I would hope that Kaya will become something of a monument to what has been lost,” says de Bernières. “And a symbol of what could be regained.”
Tour operators: with Simply Turkey (020 8541 2204, www.simplytravel.com), a week, self-catering, at Beatrix Cottage, Kaya, starts at £525pp, including flights from Gatwick to Dalaman (or from Manchester for a £25 supplement).
Other operators offering accommodation in the Kaya Valley include Cachet Travel (020 8847 3846, www.cachet-travel.co.uk) and Tapestry Holidays (020 8235 7777,
www.tapestryholidays.com). Exclusive Escapes’ Hidden Turkey portfolio (020 8605 3500, www.hiddenturkey.com) will include four restored properties in the village from 2005.
Further reading: Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernières (Secker & Warburg £16.99).
