The rock monasteries of Cappadocia. In the days of Byzantium, monks turned weird rock cones into a city of cells and churches. It was part of central Turkey and a volcano buried the country-side for forty square miles in a lava hundreds of feet deep. The lava became a soft porous stone which wind and weather carved into towering cones and abstract shapes. The came Christian monks, who burrowed into the cones and created an extraordinary and unusual Byzantine world of their own. There is no real answer, no plausible explanation that lends itself to figuring out where these monks came from. What can be certain is that they followed the wise rule of Saint Basil, the contemporary of Julian the Apostate, the correspondent of Saint Gregory of Nanzianus and of Origen, who had sought refuge centuries before in nearby Caesarea.
Read More:http://www.artknowledgenews.com/21_12_2011_00_43_00_the_penn_museum_presents_ahmet_ertugs_vaults_of_heaven_visions_of_byzantium.html ---Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.- The Penn Museum is pleased to present "Vaults of Heaven: Visions of Byzantium", an exhibition of large-scale photographs by Turkish photographer Ahmet Ertug, on view at the museum through February 12th 2012. The grandeur of Byzantine Christian art — preserved through the ages in early Christian churches in the Cappadocia region of Turkey — is the focus of this large-scale photography exhibition. "Vaults of Heaven: Visions of Byzantium" contains 13 color photographs by renowned Turkish photographer Ahmet Ertug documenting the interiors of three churches — the Karankik Kilise (Dark Church), the New Church of Tokali (Buckle Church), and the Meryem Ana Kilisesi (Church of the Mother of God) — all more than 1,000 years old and all UNESCO World Heritage Sites. ---
We know too that this is something of a backwater in terms of scholars and grammarians, for the iconographic spelling and the scrolls in the hands of the painted saints are said to be arbitrary and somewhat phonetic. Experts have called it monasticism of a simple and rudimentary variety. The Levant, at that time, was sprinkled with ascetic extremists. Anchorites immured themselves in caves. Stylites, seated on the capitals of ruined temples, wore their lives away in prayer and meditation, and the stranger still Dendrites, are said to have chained themselves for decades to the topmost branches of lofty trees.
Read More:http://melstravel.com/2007/06/07/cappadocia-turkey ---This place is awesome! Located in the central party of Turkey (nearest big town is Kayseri), this region is dominated by a large volcano. The rock formations from its ash deposits are soft, and nature erodes them into fantastic shapes, many of them like big mushrooms. People work the rock too. The region is full of dwellings, villages, even entire cities carved out of the stone---
Stranger still is the date of the valley’s evacuation, at least as problematic as that of the cutting of the first grotto. The cause is unknown and there are few chronicles or records of travelers. Maybe there were lost edicts from Byzantium evoked by some unknown heresy, of a sudden and bezerk raid from advancing Mongols. No one knows. The caves, the crepuscular churches and the numberless painted saints remain as enigmatical as ever.
Read More: http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-photo/wareameye/27/1287499848/23_cappadocia.jpg/tpod.html---A clandestine photo taken without flash. No photos are allowed inside to protect the frescoes, and the guards yell at you if you look suspiciously like you are sneaking photos. I escape without imprisonment.--- the photo is indicative that many of the frescoes are still quite intact; they are more artlessly painted and a little less rigidly conventional than the great Byzantine works of Greece and Istanbul.
To the Occidental eye, these relics seem to lack the overpowering sadness of the monastic remains of Western Europe. Byzantium has vanished in any event, swept out of Asia Minor forever and today only Moslems inhabit these peculiar regions. The rock monasteries keep their secret almost as closely guarded as Stonehenge, yet this valley of empty husks is the nearest thing in existence to the vanished colonies of the Thebaid in which all Christian monasticism has its roots and is the type of burning wilderness that scattered hermits like Saint Jerome shared his desert cell with a lion and compiled the Vulgate. Probably, these outlandish places are far closer to the primitive beginnings of monasticism than the dim northern silence and the claustral penumbra which the thought of monasteries most readily conjures up. This is a world inside out, mysteriously embedded in some hard transparent element through which we all magically advance…
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