Every week the Sweet Seller comes through the village, walking the back lanes, selling his wares. He stops in the small squares, sets up his wooden butlers tray and calls to the housewives. He sells sticky, dense, sponge cake soaked in sweet liquor. We buy them at 1ytl a slice and eat them off squares of bright pink paper, licking the last drops from the paper.
In the early morning in spring the valley is wreathed in mist, curls of gossamer around the houses. In the soft, pearly, early morning light the villagers come from their homes, swathed in layers of clothes against the early chill, off to work in the fields, ploughing with horses between the straight lines of the olive trees, tending the vines and gathering the first of the green almonds.
Twice a week the Fishman comes to the village, trays of ice in the back of his truck displaying soldier straight arrangements of mackerel and bass and pale orange snappers. The village cats gather politely around the van, licking fish blood from the paving stones with pointed pink tongues and gazing longingly at the fish.
Every morning our neighbour takes her sheep to the hillside to graze, they boil out from her yard with the lead sheep in her halter shouldering her way bossily to the front. The new lambs skitter along in the rear and are not averse to being picked up and given a quick hug; they smell of rich milk and new straw and warm wool.
At the village store which is 4m square, I can buy gas canisters, electric extension cable and plugs (any length I want, buy by the metre), fresh bread and village eggs, new milk and helva, a new electricity meter and water meter, wellies, home made cheese, chocolate, cured beef sausage, sugar, 6 varieties of tea, newspapers, olive oil (4 different varieties), under the counter locally made wine (bring your own empty bottle!), dvd players, crisps, local butter, beer, water, coca cola, organic fruit and vegetables, rope, batteries, and pickled peas and chillies in huge plastic jars.
In the afternoon the elderly village ladies sit on their well brushed steps soaking up the sunlight, they knit lurid jumpers to inflict on small children and police the games and tumbles of the village children who play jump rope in the streets.
On the high pass into the valley from the coast the shy goat boy manages his unruly herd of long haired, prong horned goats. On Sundays he quietly moves the herd to higher rocky ground as the people from Kusadasi come to picnic on the flower carpeted lawns of the pass and enjoy the views over the sea.
posted 24-03-2007