A Byzantine Settlement In Cappadocia

Based on four seasons of fieldwork, this book presents the results of the first systematic site survey of a region rich in material remains. From architecture to fresco painting, Cappadocia represents a previously untapped resource for the study of material culture and the settings of daily life within the Byzantine Empire.

Cappadocia is unrivaled in its preservation of the physical remains of the Byzantine Empire: churches, towns and villages, agricultural installations, storage facilities, and other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia.

The focus of the book is a particular region of the Byzantine Empire, Cappadocia, within Anatolia, in the centre of what is now Turkey. Its history as a part of this confederation of territories coincides with the medieval period in Europe. This monograph deals with various aspects of the province; it begins with its environment and climate, goes to some of its institutions and buildings, and ends with the paintings which the art-ists employed to decorate the latter, as well as with a particular type of inscriptions (those along the frontiers). It also considers education in Cappadocia during the Byzantines. The study is a scholarly/professional work that draws on the author's current research as well as on the material which the author developed in the last four years while teaching for the University of Ox-ford.

This is the first in-depth historical study of Byzantine Cappadocia. The authors draw on extensive textual and archaeological materials to examine the nature and place of Cappadocia in the Byzantine Empire from the fourth through eleventh centuries.

This is a fully illustrated account of the rock-cut monasteries, hermitages and other complexes in Cappadocia, Turkey.

Following its initial publication in 2005, A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia has become a seminal work in interpreting the rich material remains of Byzantine Cappadocia. In the first systematic site survey from the region, at the settlement known as Çanlı Kilise in Western Cappadocia, the careful mapping and documentation of rock-cut and masonry architecture and its decoration led to a complete reexamination of the place of Cappadocia within the larger framework of Byzantine social and cultural developments. This revised edition builds upon its predecessor with an updated preface, a new bibliography, and a new master map of the Çanlı Kilise site. Based on four seasons of fieldwork, Ousterhout challenges the commonly accepted notion that the rock-cut settlements of Cappadocia were primarily monastic. He proposes instead that the settlement at Çanlı Kilise was a town, replete with mansions, hovels, barns, stables, storerooms, cisterns, dovecotes, wine presses, fortifications, places of refuge, churches, chapels, cemeteries, and a few monasteries--that is, features common to most Byzantine communities. A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia has led to a rethinking of such sites and to a view of Cappadocia as an untapped resource for the study of material culture and daily life within the Byzantine Empire.

Tokali Kilise (Buckle Church) was the principal sanctuary of a large monastic center in Byzantine Cappadocia, now central Turkey. This cave church was carved into the soft volcanic stone of the region and decorated with frescoes in several stages between the mid-ninth and mid-tenth centuries, and is one of the richest ensembles of painting to survive from the early Middle Ages.

Abstract: