The long weekend

But then I remember. Of course! It’s Friday, and the builders don’t come to work today, or if they do, it’s only in late morning or, better still, in the afternoon, hence the blissful silence.

How can that be, you may be wondering? Isn’t Sunday supposed to be the day of rest as laid down by Atatürk way back in the 1920s? Well, yes and no because here in Cappadocia we work to a very varied set of days off. It’s true that the bank, the post office, the school and the people employed in the belediye (municipality) stick to the Monday-to-Friday schedule designated “modern” by Atatürk. But when it comes to other forms of work, the age-old pre-republican mindset still asserts a strong grip in these parts.

As everywhere in the world, the demands of farming wait for no rest days, be they Sunday or Friday. But in the construction field there are no such nature-dictated rules, and if Friday always was the day of rest, so it still is here today except that I haven’t quite adjusted my biological rhythms to accept it (and to be fair the builders do sometimes cheat by making a unilateral decision to work on a Friday, so that if I dare to leave out the earplugs I risk a rude awakening).

The odd thing is, though, that in oh-so-conservative nearby Nevşehir, where older women still walk around in thick shawls and white lower-face veils, the majority of traders are on the Atatürk side. True, you get hustled out of the door of lots of the shops when time comes for midday prayers on Friday and may still find yourself invited to drink tea to while away the time until a shopkeeper comes back from prayers at any time of day. Still, Friday is a normal working day in Nevşehir, and when from time to time I make the mistake of going there on a Sunday it’s to find the high street as dead as the proverbial dodo, just as Atatürk would have wanted it. The glaring exception is Forum Nevşehir, our glam new shopping mall on the site of the old bus station. There they’ve embraced modernity with both hands, which means that the shop doors are open on every day of the week.

Down in the center of Göreme where tourism rules the roost, the working week is more or less 24/7 from the start of April through to the end of October, when everyone collapses in an exhausted heap. Some of the larger businesses have finally accepted the need to allow staff one day off a week on a rotating basis. Forget Friday or Sunday, though, since these are two of the busiest days in the week as short-breakers from Ankara add to the normal touristic throng.

What this adds up to is a chaotic structure to the week, which takes a little getting used to and that clearly I still haven’t wholly mastered despite 13 years of trying.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.