Turkey - The Thousand and one Churches
86 images Created 14 Sep 2020
April 24, 2021, Joe Biden has become the first US president to issue a statement formally describing the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide. July 2020, Turkish president Erdoğan ordered the reclassification of Hagia Sophia as a mosque, revoking the monument’s status as museum from 1934. Syriac monks, the last Christian presence in Eastern Anatolia, often are streaked between Kurds and Turks and constantly undermined by endless legal disputes with Turkish government.
The last Christian heritage of Anatolia, beautiful Byzantine and Middle Age monuments monuments, often is in danger to follow the same fate, or to be soon overwhelmed by irreparable collapses for maintenance never realized or disappear even in the collective memory. Not in Cappadocia, a booming tourist reality, but rather in remote locations of Eastern Anatolia.
It is the hidden world, unknown to the rest of the world, of The Thousand and One Churches, the title of a book published in 1909 by the archeologist William Ramsey and leading traveller and archeologist Gertrude Bell who explored, mapped, and became so influential to British imperial policy-making in Middle East, like Lawrence of Arabia, to be nicknamed Gertrude of Arabia, or The Queen of the Desert in a movie of Werner Herzog. The most scenic archeological site is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ani, the “City of 40 gates and 1001 churches” along the Silk Road that challenged Cairo and Constantinople. Ani managed to survive to the Tatars and many years of neglect by Turkish authorities, which in 1921 officially decided to “sweep its monuments from the face of the Earth,” but happily, they fail. Today is a ghost town in a sea of grass with giant stone skeletons of churches lost in the space of silences symbolically enclosed by the imposing walls of a Bastiani fortress crowned with carved crosses. Nestled in the mountains north of Erzurum, the Georgian cathedral of Oskvank is an open-air stone shell that anticipates the Gothic architecture by centuries, in the heart of a territory threatened by a large projected dam. On the Van lake's shores, the Holy Cross basilica is an absolute masterpiece of Armenian architecture on the small islet of Akdamar. In southeastern Anatolia, not far from the border with Syria, few Syriac church monasteries like Shafran near Mardin and Mar Gabriel on the Plateau of Tur Abdin (the “Mountain of the Servants of God”) are still alive after many centuries of vicissitudes.
The last Christian heritage of Anatolia, beautiful Byzantine and Middle Age monuments monuments, often is in danger to follow the same fate, or to be soon overwhelmed by irreparable collapses for maintenance never realized or disappear even in the collective memory. Not in Cappadocia, a booming tourist reality, but rather in remote locations of Eastern Anatolia.
It is the hidden world, unknown to the rest of the world, of The Thousand and One Churches, the title of a book published in 1909 by the archeologist William Ramsey and leading traveller and archeologist Gertrude Bell who explored, mapped, and became so influential to British imperial policy-making in Middle East, like Lawrence of Arabia, to be nicknamed Gertrude of Arabia, or The Queen of the Desert in a movie of Werner Herzog. The most scenic archeological site is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ani, the “City of 40 gates and 1001 churches” along the Silk Road that challenged Cairo and Constantinople. Ani managed to survive to the Tatars and many years of neglect by Turkish authorities, which in 1921 officially decided to “sweep its monuments from the face of the Earth,” but happily, they fail. Today is a ghost town in a sea of grass with giant stone skeletons of churches lost in the space of silences symbolically enclosed by the imposing walls of a Bastiani fortress crowned with carved crosses. Nestled in the mountains north of Erzurum, the Georgian cathedral of Oskvank is an open-air stone shell that anticipates the Gothic architecture by centuries, in the heart of a territory threatened by a large projected dam. On the Van lake's shores, the Holy Cross basilica is an absolute masterpiece of Armenian architecture on the small islet of Akdamar. In southeastern Anatolia, not far from the border with Syria, few Syriac church monasteries like Shafran near Mardin and Mar Gabriel on the Plateau of Tur Abdin (the “Mountain of the Servants of God”) are still alive after many centuries of vicissitudes.
