A couple weekends ago I had the chance to spend a few hours on Saturday morning exploring the center of Kayseri. I hadn’t played tourist for a while so it was kind of fun. Most of our group hung out drinking çay, but Ayla, Sinan, and I wandered around taking photos of old buildings.
Kayseri is a fairly big (about the size of Antalya; ~1,000,000 people) industrial city in the center of Turkey. The skyline is dominated to the south by the volcano Mount Ericyes, the real reason our motley crew of mountaineers came to Kayseri.
I suppose the main tourist site is the museum complex inside the old city walls. However, that is closed for restoration work until May so we couldn’t enter. We did enter the old covered pazar which has been turned into a fairly uninteresting clothes market. Here an attractive young shopkeeper is doing some friendly bargaining with Leyla over the price of a scarf.
In the center of Kayseri most of the old buildings were from the Ottoman and Selcuk periods, but what’s really fascinating in Turkey is the mix of old and new — in architecture, in clothes, in thoughts and traditions.
After our overnight dolmuş ride from Antalya and shortly before arriving in Kayseri, we were treated to a beautiful Kapadokya sunrise.
