It's a full day's drive inland from the shores of the Bosphorus and the pleasure of rice-stuffed mussels, along a six-lane highway that rises through forested slopes onto the Anatolian plateau and into the heart of Cappodocia, surely one of the strangest landscapes on earth.
We might as well be on the surface of the moon, had it not been for evidence of human habitation in the honey-coloured cliffs and valleys carved by wind and snow out of ancient lava-flow.
The movement of techtonic plates, then as now, caused the volcanic eruptions that produce rock formations that look sometimes like tall chimneys topped by thatched cottages suitable for fairies, sometimes like gigantic mushroom caps, sometimes like pointed wizard's hats. And seen from a distance, could well be armies of grey-clad warriors marching forth to war.
The outlines of the fairy chimneys change as the rock crumbles and new shapes grow - at first as triangular pyrmids, eroding through the layers with firmest and darkest forming the caps.
The lava-cliffs are soft enough to scoop out cave dwellings, refuges for first-century Christians escaped from Judea, hiding from Roman soldiers, who planted vines and lived off the land. Earlier inhabitants made subterranean villages, clusters of dwellings dug vertically in layers, and buried their dead among the living.
The land is bone-dry in autumn before the rains, but lines of poplars indicate a source of water soaked deep into the porous pumice. Pigeons were used for communication and their droppings were gathered to fertilise vines and fruit trees laden at the end of summer with quince, pomegranate, little dry-fleshed plums.
From an observation platform beside the road can be see the cave-village of Goreme, and in the distance, Mount Argus shrouded in mist. Beneath our feet, pigeons come and go from nest-holes in the cliff-face.
"These birds are not eating-pigeons but messenger-birds, used for communication", says Gamze, dropping a coin in a slot to buy grain from a dispenser.
We - Gamze Ineceli, my friend and guide to all things edible and Turkish, and her kind and patient husband Arda - stop for lunch at a tourist complex at the entrance to one of the golden mushroom-villages, Pasabag, a place where wedding couples are having their photos taken in the long-deserted Christian cave-dwellings.
The tourist canteen is closed, it being late in the season, but there are gozleme, griddle-breads, rolled out with a thin broom-handle and cooked to order by a scarved and zoave-trousered Cappadocian matron, and flipped over to enclose shredded greens, a trickle of olive il and an egg cracked over the top that cooks rapidly in the heat.
The early Christian monks who took refuge in this seemingly uninhabitable land established themselves in secret cave-dwellings, many of which have only recently dropped out of use. A stand of the tall poplars shades the entrance to the troglodite village of Goreme, and a grapevine has found a toehold in a steep set of steps. Vines were planted by the early Christians, and the Alevis, followers of the Prophet, who took up residence later are also permitted to drink wine. The Koran doesn't mention distilled spirits, a reason for the acceptability of drinking raki.
Among the warren of interconnected living-areas that housed the monks is a refectory with a long table and seating for some fifty monks carved into the rock. On the far side, another doorway leads into a kitchen area with a tandoor oven scooped out of the floor.
""The last residents left within living memory," says Gamze. "The local people who came to live here, many of them for the same reason as the monks, were known for the traditional cooking of Cappadocia. As you can see, they cooked in a tandoor, the round stone-walled oven you find all over eastern Europe and Asia, from Iran to Mongolia, not just India."
Many of the traditional dishes of Anatolia - the Asian lands of Turkey - are meat-based, reminders of a nomadic past, made with lamb and young beef. Nomads don't farm. It was not until they settled down on the rolling pastures of Anatolia that they began to grow wheat among the sheep, plant vineyards and orchards and vegetable gardens in the rich volcanic soil.
The result, in the fulness of time, was the development of one of the most sophisticated and influential gastronomic traditions anywhere on the planet.
Paid subscribers (don’t I just love you!) will be in happy receipt of a recipe for sigara (see above, traditional with raki on the mezze table, as if you didn’t know it!) just as soon as I get my act together this weekend.
Meanwhile, for the flavour of Istanbul in the days of the Ottoman Sultans, read Jason Goodwin’s brilliant Ottoman who-done-it, “The Janissary Tree”.
What a great adventure! Turkish food is my favorite. I've never explored beyond Istanbul but I hope to one day
Ditto. Hi Nancy