Avanos
"The clay smelled like rain and something older — like the river had been keeping it in reserve."
The Kızılırmak is Turkey’s longest river, and it passes through Avanos carrying red clay washed down from the Anatolian plateau — a deep, silty red that stains the banks and gives the ceramics of this town their distinctive colour. I arrived in the afternoon with no particular plan, crossed the old Ottoman bridge, and followed the sound of a wheel turning in a narrow workshop just off the main street. The potter, a man in his fifties with forearms that looked carved from the same material he was shaping, glanced up once and then went back to the cylinder rising between his hands.
Avanos is a gentle town, quieter than Göreme and without the hostel churn that makes some Cappadocia destinations feel like they exist purely in service of tourism. The workshops here are family operations, often spanning three or four generations, and the connection between the craftspeople and the material they use is something you feel immediately. The clay is still pulled directly from the riverbed. The wheels are still foot-kicked in some places. The glazes still use traditional mineral pigments. At one workshop I was invited to sit and try, and the clay collapsed on me twice before something vaguely cylindrical emerged, uneven and asymmetrical, which the potter regarded with diplomatic silence.
The town has a strange and wonderful cultural institution: a hair museum. The story goes that a local potter missed a French traveller so acutely after she left that he asked her to leave a lock of hair, and she did, and he hung it on the wall, and other women passing through heard the story and did the same, and now there are tens of thousands of locks of hair from all over the world covering the cave ceiling of a workshop near the main square. It is odd, absolutely, and a little touching — a physical record of all the people who passed through and felt something here.
I had dinner by the river: kofta grilled over charcoal, served with a tomato salad dressed with pomegranate molasses and a basket of still-warm bread. The restaurant had maybe eight tables and the owner brought a small bowl of walnuts with the tea without mentioning them. Across the water, the lights of the opposite bank reflected in the slow current. The clay smell from the workshops carried on the air even after dark.
When to go: Avanos is pleasant year-round and less weather-dependent than the balloon-centric parts of Cappadocia. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable for walking the town and exploring workshops, which are typically open from morning until early evening. Saturday mornings bring a small market near the bridge worth arriving early for.