Introduction

In the Turkish village of Göreme where houses are dug out of rock, a group of five local men were planning to open a new tourism business called ‘Bedrock Travel Agency’. When asked why they wanted to give it this name, one of the men answered ‘Why not, Göreme is Bedrock, isn’t it?’ Many other tourism businesses in the village have also adopted this theme, following the American comedy cartoon in which ‘The Flintstones’ live caveman-style in rock-cut houses; Göreme has a ‘Flintstones Cave Bar’, ‘Flintstones Motel-Pansiyon’, ‘Rock Valley Pansiyon’ and so on. These businesses, dotted around the village, encourage a view among tourists of Göreme as a kind of fantasy-land purposefully adapted to accommodate themselves and their supposed tastes for ‘different’ and ‘fun’ worlds. Yet, while for them Göreme appears as something of a theme-park, seemingly created commercially for tourist entertainment and recreation, it is, from another view, a centuries-old village whose populace has long been digging caves for habitation out of the tall rock pinnacles that cover the landscape and working the dry rocky soil into gardens from which to live. Since the development of tourism in the Cappadocia region and the designation in 1985 of the Göreme valley as a World Heritage Site, the Göreme villagers have been treading the fine line between dealing with the often harsh reality of their own lives and simultaneously colluding with their tourist visitors to create the necessary fantasy to accommodate the visitors’ desires.