ABSTRACT
The middle son of ‘Anne’ is Abbas, who runs a tour agency connected with the pansiyon of his younger brother. As I said in the introduction chapter, Abbas adopted me as his ‘niece’ while I was in Göreme, so I spent a lot of time in the company of himself and his family. Abbas is in his mid-forties and has lived in Göreme all his life. Before running the agency he owned and ran restaurants in the village, and he prides himself on the fact that he opened the first ‘tourist restaurant’ in Göreme in 1977. The tour agency he runs now sells daily mini-bus tours around the sites of Cappadocia, hires out mopeds and exchanges foreign currency. This is where Abbas spends much of his time during the summer months, though, because he employs university students to work throughout the summer season, he is fairly free to come and go from the agency when he wants in order to visit friends doing similar work in other
tourism businesses or to go fishing at a river ten kilometres from Göreme. Whenever necessary he also helps his wife with the gardening work in their five gardens or orchards. During the extremely cold and often snowy winter, when few tourists pass through the village, there is not much work to be done in the agency. Nor is there anything to do in the fields, so Abbas sleeps long hours and spends most of the day chatting and drinking tea with friends in the tea house at the centre of the village.
