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Now, you might wonder, “Why did she buy a house on top of a disco in the first place?” Lot’s of people wonder. Friends in Gümüslük – a fishing village/resort town on the Aegean where I fled this past May to escape the upcoming summer season of dunga, dunga, dunga and having to smile back at my disco neighbors even as we proceed with our lawsuit (because Turkish etiquette requires smiling at people who are screwing you) – wonder. The Avanos police, who, thanks to my neighbors, I now have a very smiling relationship with, have wondered this aloud to me on numerous occasions, usually at the start of yet another futile post-two a.m. telephone conversation, as they provide me with yet another reason why they are not going to do anything about my complaint and why it might not have been the greatest idea to buy my house over the disco. Which is that the owner of the disco is a retired police commissioner. Actually, the retired police commissioner doesn’t own the disco, he just owns the property on (over?) which the disco is located. His son the psychopath owns the disco. The bad idea was not buying a house next to a disco. The bad idea was buying a house next to a disco owned by a psychopath whose father is a retired police commissioner. In a small town. In Turkey. I am now convinced that the devil resides in Turkey, more specifically, on Mt. Erciyes, the extinct volcano in Central Anatolia that helped found the fantastic landscape of Cappadocia several millennia before M.K. Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic. At the very least, if he doesn’t reside their permanently (the devil, not Ataturk), it was his operational base for an attack on this particular mortal soul. “Hello, Deborah! Over here!” he called. “Here I am, right in front of Your Balcony, the Kizilirmak flowing before me, the sun rising behind me; Here I am, the piece de resistance of Your House, the house with the best view in all of Avanos.” (Actually, the best view belongs to Hatice Hanim next door, but this was the devil talking, so what do you expect?) I was tempted, and I succumbed. It didn’t hurt that the going price barely hit four digits (in U.S. currency – many more in Turkish), or that it had walls, which was a bonus that did not go unnoticed by my friend Katie, a Canadian potter who spent much of last year’s annual pilgrimage to Avanos being shown “houses” without them. It was not so important that My House didn’t have stairs (it had them, they just weren’t stacked up one on top of the other), or a functional roof, or water or plumbing or electricity. These things could be managed. What was important was that it had enough space to sleep one upstairs, to function as a painting studio downstairs, and, with a ridiculously low asking price, could be provided with stairs, roof, water, plumbing, electricity and other sundries even on the budget of an artist whose name had yet to achieve household recognition. You’d think that the price might have tipped me off, but no. I just put it up to the fact that (1) the house was tiny (compared to the 15-room mansions abandoned when Greece and Turkey “exchanged” populations in 1928, which are what lure most outsiders into becoming Cappadocian homeowners); (2) it had seen better days (sans stairs, to get inside, and from there onto the balcony where my conversation with the devil took place, required leaping through a good-size hole in the back wall of what was eventually to become a kitchen and probably the first indoor bathroom the house had ever seen); and (3) it was December. The number-one rule for house-hunting in tourist areas in Turkey is to always wait until winter, when, if you are lucky, someone will appear before you with a piece of property and an urgent need for cash. In my case,
it was a family of women, three sisters and their mother, who had inherited
the house when their father/husband had passed away. As Demet, the sister-in-charge,
explained, one sister had moved to Ankara, and mom and the other two lived
in the “desirable” modern (concrete) section of town on the other side
of the river. While they had fond memories of growing up in an old stone
house, none of the sisters were read to tackle the project of redeeming
their childhood home from the sorry state of affairs brought on by 15 years
of neglect. Besides, they could use the cash. A mutual friend had told
them I was looking for a house, and if I had the money, that was that.
I did buy the house, but in the interest of good-neighborly relations, I opted not to sue the bastards. Instead, I had a little conversation with the psychopath. I informed him that while I was aware of the fact that he had dug under my house, I did not want to take him to court. Instead, I suggested that, as he had taken upon it to use the space under my house as a disco, I might use the space over his disco as a terrace. We both thought this a rather tidy, neighborly solution. Before returning to Ankara and my job as an editor at the local English-language daily, I did make the additional request that in the future he refrain from digging under my property. He assured me that he would, most certainly, comply with my wishes. Time passed, and enough workmen wreaked enough havoc that the night came when I was finally able to spend my first night in my old stone house in Avanos. I still have fond memories of lying in my makeshift bed, staring up at my soon-to-be-stripped wood ceiling, and contemplating whether I should put up with the music coming through the window or if I should just shut it and swelter. After all, as a concession to economic necessity and the second-best view in Avanos, I had bought a house next to a disco, so I was expecting to have to compromise on some fronts. A little music was not going to be so bad. That’s what I thought, until I discovered the difference between sound wafting through windows – even at two in the morning – and dunga, dunga, dunga echoing through stone, which didn’t occur until a few years after I bought the house. One day, having driven down from Ankara for the weekend, I encountered a workman wheeling a barrow full of dirt out of the disco. After about a second of thinking, “hmm, interesting, wheelbarrow full of dirt,” I realized that the dirt in that wheelbarrow was none other than dirt coming out from under my house – and that this was not a good thing. I spent three days trying to get a hold of the disco owner with no success, so I got a hold of a camera and took some photographs of the workmen inside the disco, pickaxes in hand, chipping away at stone. The next day, the retired police commissioner came to introduce himself. He explained that the workmen were simply doing a bit of cleaning – “shaving” the surface of the stone, as it were, and “bir sey olmaz”. “Bir sey olmaz” is a Turkish expression that I really despise. It means “nothing will happen”, and I despise it because something usually does. In this case, what happened was that the dunga, dunga, dunga began. Of more serious concern was the black smoke wafting through my house – from the inside. It turned out that some of the dirt being removed from under my house was for another fireplace gone awry, this time with a chimney that turned out to be my entire studio. That was when
I decided to take action. I went to the mayor’s office. I went to the district
representative of the central government. I went to the local prosecutor.
I went to the gentlemen at the title office, who surveyed my house and
informed me that, while they didn’t have the appropriate equipment to confirm
an underground violation, they could confirm an above-ground violation
of about 30 square meters – or what I prefer to think of as my new downstairs
kitchen, bathroom and guest bedroom. I went to the Institution for the
Preservation of Cultural and Natural Treasures of the Province of Nevsehir,
who went to the state prosecutor, who asked for eight month’s jail time
for digging under – lo and behold! – a registered historical property.
I went to a lawyer, and I went to the retired police commissioner, and
I told him I intended to sue his socks off. This didn’t put him off in
the least, which probably had something to do with a well-connected faith
in the Turkish legal system.
In spite of all this, I am convinced this story is going to have a happy ending. My lawsuit continues to creep its way towards justice. Sooner or later the judge will hear testimony from another neighbor, owner of the wall-less stone house in front of the disco, where, it turned out, most of the dirt from under my house was dumped, and from a former bouncer, who, so he says, got tired of sweeping up the dirt that came down every time the music went up. And the judge seems like a sensible woman who will know a pickaxe when she sees one. In the end I should really be thanking both the police commissioner and the psychotic. If not for them, I would not be where I am now – looking out on a tangerine grove, the beach a 12-minute-walk away, the sun setting behind a smattering of Greek islands (where the devil holidays when he’s not on Mt. Erciyes), embarking on a brand new career as an author, and trying to figure out how selling my flat in Ankara (that’s another story) can get me enough money to buy a plot of land and build an old stone house in the fishing village/resort town of Gümüslük. This time, I can assure you, I am not planning on living next to a disco. All in all, I remain cautiously optimistic, having armed myself with the advice of a real estate agent in Ankara (“check with the title office to ensure that the title you are purchasing belongs to the plot of land you think it does, and not one five kilometers away) and with an old Turkish saying, related to me by numerous well-wishers after I bought a charming old stone house in Avanos: “Evi alma, komsulari al” (“Don’t buy the house, buy the neighbors”). To contact
Deborah Click Here
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