Keynote address

 

The Sacred Landscapes of Matar:

Continuity from the Iron Age through the Roman Period

Lynne E. Roller (University of California, Davis)

 

            The association of the Phrygian goddess Matar with the sacred spaces of the Anatolian countryside is well known.  The landscape of central Anatolia is rich in cult monuments, ranging from small altars and step monuments to elaborately carved cult facades, which were erected during the early centuries of the first millennium BCE.  These cult monuments surely honored Matar along with a larger pantheon of male and female deities.  Many of these monuments are now located in rather isolated areas, and this, together with the goddess’s most frequent attributes of the hawk and the lion, have often coupled the goddess’s identity with the wild and remote countryside.  In fact, the most prominent cult monuments are not so remote: they were erected along transportation routes or near urban centers, and thus reflect patterns of settlement in the region, even when the actual monument was not located within an urban community.  Given how deeply engrained the cult traditions that created such monuments must have been, it is surprising that that construction of Phrygian cult monuments declines abruptly in the middle of the first millennium BCE.  Part of the reason for this can be ascribed to depleted economic conditions in the region after Anatolia was absorbed into the Achaemenian Empire: the large carved facades, for example, would have required extensive financial resources, and when such resources were no longer available, the facades ceased to be made; some, e.g. the Areyastin Monument, were abandoned unfinished.  The change in political sovereignty, however, would probably not have affected the religious attitudes of the majority of the Phrygian population, and it is likely that many traditional cult practices continued unchanged.  My goal is to review the evidence for Phrygian cult after the era of Phrygian dominance in central Anatolia to investigate how changing political hegemony and cultural patterns affected Phrygian cult practice.  The cult facades themselves, with their vivid depictions of Phrygian architecture, indicate that cult centered on the royal household was of great significance, and evidence from Gordion and other sites demonstrates the continuing importance of houses as centers of cult practice.  In some rural centers, in areas near Midas City and at Dümrek, near Gordion, the idols and step altars continued to function as cult centers, although their use appears to decline during the Hellenistic period.  Traditional cult practice did not die out, however, and epigraphic evidence points to the continued use of Phrygian shrines in rural and village settings. Indeed, there are indications of a resurgence of interest in Phrygian cult centers and cult symbols during the second and third centuries CE.  These could include older cult centers and those with striking new cult installations, such as Aizanoi.  This suggests that the Phrygian affinity with the sacred landscapes and symbols of their past was not a dead issue but continued to be an important part of the population’s ongoing sense of itself as a people with a unique identity.

 

Session 1 Bronze Age and Preclassical

If the King Celebrates the Antahsum-festival in the Forest of Taurischa
 - the Concept of Landscape in the Hittite World

Rainer-Maria Czichon (Freie Üniversität, Berlin)

no abstract

Sacred Space in Iron Age Phrygia

Susanne Berndt-Ersöz (Stockholm University)

Using material evidence from the Early Phrygian period until the Late Phrygian period (c. 8th century to 330BC), this paper will examine the changing nature of Phrygian sacred spaces over a geographical area stretching from the Phrygian Highlands in the west to the Phrygian periphery east of the Halys.

During this time several fundamental transformations may be identified.  There appears for example to have been a transformation of Phrygian religion towards the end of the 8th century BC, as witnessed by alterations in the use of sacred space but also by a new cult iconography.

Through an analysis of the Phrygian cult from a socio-historical perspective, the paper will aim to uncover the underlying processes at work in order to offer some explanations for these alterations in cult practices and in the use of sacred space.

The Meaning of Shape. 
Pottery Traditions and Inventions in the Sanctuary of Bronze Age Miletus

Ivonne Kaiser (Deutsche Archäologisches Institut, Athens)

The paper will discuss the ceramic evidence in the Late Bronze Age sanctuary at Miletus regarding the aspects of who performed rites and what is to be told of the ritual action. The pottery shows that a new group of settlers from Crete must have arrived at the end of the Middle Bronze/beginning of the Late Bronze Age and brought with them their own ceramic tradition produced from this time onwards in the local clay. Since the overall impression of the assemblages is of Cretan character it is to assume that the people performing rites at the sanctuary were people from Crete. But a small percentage of especially drinking vessels and other open shapes appear, which are unknown in the Aegean or Cretan world. So the question is: Did the Cretan settlers take over forms of local ritual pratices or did they merely use the shapes of the native population for their own purposes?

Session 2 Greek, Roman and Byzantine

 

Epigraphy versus Archaeology: Conflicting Evidence for Cult Continuity in Ionia during the 5th Century BC

Anja Slawisch (Bilkent University)

 

The economic and cultural prosperity of the Ionian region during Archaic times is well documented by epigraphic and archaeological evidence. A dramatic change took place however – at least with respect to politics – when Ionian cities were conquered by the Persians in 546/5 B.C. Among other things, cities were now obliged to pay levies to the Persian state, and to provide soldiers for its army. Whether the outbreak of the Ionian revolt in 498 B.C. is mainly to be attributed to the economic decline of Ionia under the Persian reign, or not, is a matter of fierce debate for ancient historians. However, it is beyond any doubt that the Ionian revolt, and in particular the defeat of the Ionians (494 B.C.), marks a decisive event for both every day life and cult worship as well as political-administrative forms of organization across the entire region. Despite the fact that inscriptions suggest a certain cult continuation, there is indeed a remarkable break of votive traditions during the 5th and the first half of the 4th century B.C. In presenting archaeological evidence from different cult sites along the sacred way from the Delphinion in Miletos to the Didymeion this paper will discuss issues for a new interpretation and new evaluation of the Ionian sacred landscape during the classical period.

Sacred Landscapes of Sinop and the Black Sea Littoral

Owen Doonan (California State University, Northridge)

 

This paper examines the evidence for sacred landscapes on the Sinop promontory from Greek through early Ottoman times based on the results of the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project and other research carried out on the Sinop promontory (Doonan 2004; Doonan and Bauer 2006; French 2005). Problems are discussed relating to the recovery through systematic survey of special purpose sites related to sacred topographies. The possibilities of long-term continuity are considered particularly with respect to the structure of communications and trade within the promontory. Results from Sinop will be discussed in light of other case studies along the Anatolian Pontic region.

Vision and the Ordered Invisible:
Geometry, Space, and Architecture in Sanctuaries of Hellenistic Asia Minor

John R. Senseney (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

 

This paper explores how invisible geometric underpinnings, conceptual lines, and experiential planes ordered Hellenistic sacred environments and united their architectural elements with meaningful features of the natural landscape. Analytic geometry and CAD software reveal a hidden geometric system underlying Temple A of the Asklepieion at Kos, providing an impetus to revisit earlier research on geometric inscriptions and evidence for planning methods found in Hellenistic sanctuaries in Asia Minor. I suggest that the geometric sensibility prevalent in Vitruvian architectural theory is rooted in the symbiotic production of Hellenistic sacred architecture and mathematical thought, fostering shared practices of visualizing and representing space in temples, landscape, geography, and astronomy. Salient examples of these tendencies are observable in environments in Priene, Pergamon, Didyma, Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, Teos, and Kos. Ultimately, these environments demonstrate the architectural ordering of built forms according to invisible forms posited to underlie nature, a practice concomitant with the coeval philosophy of idealism.

Considerations about Cult Traditions in the City and Vicinity of Pergamon

Soi Agelidis (Deutsche Archäologisches Institut, Istanbul)

 

Pergamon is distinguished by its location on the top of a rocky elevation in the Kaikos-River valley. The hellenistic kingdom could initially hardly legitimate its existence and claim of power due to its lack of long history and of an outstanding provenience of its founder Philetairos. Nevertheless the Attalids knew how to compensate this deficit by a systematic use of mythology and cult. Likewise they could enforce their claim of dominance over the vicinity of Pergamon. On the basis of particular cults it is going to be shown, how the worship of gods could arise in a local forming benefited by the landscape situation given to be adapted and instrumentalised by a superior power in order to utilize the cults tradition for its own purposes. The focus will lay on the cult’s origins in the history of Mysia, the constitution of the sanctuaries and their advancement by the Pergamene rulers in later times.

Sacred Topographies in Byzantium and the Cappadocian Landscape

Veronica Kalas (Wayne State University)

 

When European travelers and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered Cappadocia’s exotic landscape of volcanic rock formations and the abundant rock-cut spaces carved therein, they formulated a spiritual interpretation for the region.  According to a romantic outlook, Byzantine ascetics sought refuge from the world by digging into the saintly isolation of the living rock.  Coupled with the knowledge that Basil the Great, founder of Orthodox Christian monasticism, originated from Caesarea in Cappadocia, all medieval remains from the region were seen to belong to a monastic context.  In the twentieth century scholars began to discover and catalogue hundreds of rock-cut churches that preserve a wealth of art-historically informative painted interiors.  Cappadocia’s church paintings are an invaluable resource for establishing the developments in style, iconography, and patronage of Byzantine monumental art.  Because Byzantine painting is primarily religious in content, however, and monasteries were known to attract the most devout in Byzantine society, a direct correlation eventually emerged between Cappadocia’s painted churches and monasteries, without a basis in the social, cultural, and architectural history of the region.

A newly discovered and documented group of rock-cut architectural ensembles from Byzantine Cappadocia challenge the supposed sacred landscape of the region.  Churches that were never painted and rooms that were never churches constitute categories of evidence that do not fit the traditional monastic interpretation.  Rock-cut kitchens, stables, ceremonial halls, and monumental façades arranged around courtyards all point to elite residential architecture that can best be understood in the context of Cappadocia’s landed aristocracy of the tenth to eleventh centuries than anything sacred or monastic. These complexes open fresh lines of investigation into Byzantine domestic architecture, settlement patterns, and secular use of space and show that the realms of “secular” and “sacred” have never been clearly defined in Byzantine architecture of Cappadocia. 

Sacred in the Byzantine world need not mean purely ascetic or monastic.  Religious decorations, such as crosses, were appropriate in homes and may have decorated more public areas like dining rooms, while churches and chapels were also placed within a house.  Religion was an integral part of the domestic world and the usual separation of religious and domestic spaces into categories of sacred and secular impedes us from realizing the inseparability of these practices in the Byzantine context.  This study reveals some of the biases that have shaped how we interpret medieval cultures, in particular the prevalent assumption that the sacred existed in isolation from secular facets of life and society.   It also provides a methodology for disproving assumptions that underpin earlier interpretations and serves as a useful model for unraveling situations in which similar biases are embedded in the impressions of early scholars.

Session 3 Diachronic Perspectives

 

The Gods of Latmos. 
Cults and Rites at the Holy Mountain from Prehistoric to Byzantine Times

Anneliese Peschlow (Deutsche Archäologisches Institut, Berlin)

The Latmos range on the Western coast of Turkey was one of  the holy mountains of Asia Minor. Its peak, climbing up to nearly 1400 m and widely visible from all sides, was the site of an old stone and rain- cult. Since Neolithic times the Anatolian weather and rain-god was worshipped here. His place was later taken by Zeus. As recently as the Middle Ages processions were still sent onto the mountain’s peak during periods of severe drought to plead for rain.

As in other mountainous regions of Anatolia besides the weather deity an indigenous mountain god was worshipped in the Latmos. He came to live on in Greek mythology as the young shepherd and hunter Endymion, the lover of the moon goddess Selene. His name could also be used as name for the mountain.

The Latmian weather- and mountain god who arosed from the rocky landscape of the mountain with its innumerable caves, were the main deities of the region. The peak was the central cult place. In the western foothills of the main mountain-range a prehistoric sanctuary of the weather-god was found, in the eastern ones a sanctuary of Zeus; both of them are orientated to the summit. The Christians erected only a cross on the peak as sign of the assumption of the old pagan cult. According to the ancient authors Strabon ans Pausanias Endymion had a sanctuary in the Latmos and was buried in a cave of the mountain. The close relation between this landscape and the religious ideas of the people living here is also evident by the distribution of the prehistoric rock paintings around the peak as a center of a fertility cult and their placement on the special erosion cavities (Verwitterungsformen) of the Gneis which were considered as manifestation of the power of the mountain god.

Sacred Troia and its Visitors from Antiquity to the 20th Century

Rüstem Aslan (On Sekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Çanakkale)

From Antiquity to the present day the lure of the tale of Troia has been such that travelers have sought the place, wanting to imagine the events described by Homer in their setting. Early travelers found the generalities of Homer’s description well matched by the real topography of the Troad. Yet the specific location of the ancient citadel was difficult to establish, and became a matter of some controversy. This is perhaps rather surprising when we reflect that the Hellenistic and Roman names of the place now recognized as Troia were Ilion and Ilium Novum (New Ilium). The names “Troia” and “Ilion” seem to be interchangeable in Homer. Apparently the tradition that here was Homer’s Troia had survived the Dark Ages, when the site was probably abandoned, and the inhabitants there did not doubt that they were living on the site of old, sacred Troia. Ancient visitors from Xerxes to Alexander the Great shared this belief.

From Elyanas to Leto: 

the Physical Evolution of the Sanctuary of Leto at Xanthos

Jacques des Courtils (Université de Bordeaux)

The historical evolution of the Letoon of Xanthos, located in a marshy area, is gradually coming into focus through archaeology. Research has demonstrated that the sanctuary has indeed developed around a spring located at the foot of a hill. Although cult evidence does not go back as far as the Bronze Age, the question whether the site was already being visited during the 2^nd millennium, at a time when, especially within the Hittite Empire, springs are often the object of cults should be asked; for it remains possible that such traces are preserved in deep strata, nowadays impossible to reach because of alluvial accumulation and the abundance of ground water.

The cult begins to develop during the 7^th century BC, but which divinity was worshipped remains unknown. The persistence in historical times of a cult of the Elyanas (Lycian water divinities) appears to confirm, however, the primacy of the watery element. The presence of Greek gods (the Apollinian triad) is not firmly attested before the end of the 5^th century; one can ask whether a dynast imposed them at that time to the Lycians in the spirit of Hellenism. This would be a case, then, of new cults being introduced in a sanctuary rising to regional prominence at the same time as the city of Xanthos was extending its power to all of Western Lycia.

The water that brought about the birth of the sanctuary always played a role in it; the cult of the sacred spring never lapsed and was even renewed during the Principate, when the Romans developed its architecture in a magnificent way. It is thus interesting to note that the primeval indigenous cult remained vigorous in spite of the presence of the Greek divinities.

The sanctuary seems to have always been surrounded by water; current research confirming the legends, leads us to posit the presence of channels that allowed access to the propylaia by boat, since passable roads did not exist. Continuous alluvial accumulation, however, made refurbishing of access necessary: it is, indeed, probable that during Hellenistic times one could reach the sanctuary from the city of Xanthos (a distance of about 5 km) by a road that followed the foot of the neighbouring hills on high ground above the marsh. A bridge was finally built over the Xanthos river in Roman times.

The water that brought about the birth of the sanctuary, in the end caused its demise. During Late Roman and early Byzantine times, the Xanthians built levees in an attempt to stem the rising waters of the marsh, to no avail. Flooding from the Xanthos river and water gorged alluvial accumulation that had first made the lower sanctuary impossible to use finally overcame the whole sanctuary, so that it was abandoned in the 7^th century AD. 

Pessinous and its Holy Places

Johnny Devreker (Universiteit Ghent)

 

If there is one sacred city, it is centainly Pessinus linked as it is by myth to the Goddess Kybele and her paredros Attis. We shall confront the ancient literary testimonia with the actual landscape and archaeological remains:

- The sacred Mount Dindymon (Agdos)

- Three (or 4) Kybele monuments in a Phrygian rock landscape in the neighbourhood.

- The sacred Gallos-river and the Roman canalization system.

- No temple of Kybele has yet been found but a Sebasteion.

- Continuation of cult: the Haghia Sophia; the Byzantine monastery on mount Dindymon.

Session 4 Mediaeval and Early Modern

 

The Triconch Architecture of Medieval Eastern Anatolia

Irina Giviashvili (formerly Tbilisi State University)

The architectural type of Triconch is spread all over the world from prehistoric through modern times. It became a very comfortable type of building for secular and ritual uses; It found  different iconographical usage and typological development in many cultures of Christian church architecture; The earliest churches were found in Eastern Anatolia, in historic Georgian provinces of Tao-Oltisi and Erusheti. The Oshki Monastery church, built by King David the III Kurapalates in 963-973, is one of the most brilliant and developed examples of Tri-apsed cross-domed buildings;

This paper will focus on the role of Oshki church in designing the Triconches on Mount Athos, where it became the only building type; The paper will provide a comparative study of the Triconch type in Eastern Christian world and will emphasize the continuity of typological and sacred traditions, discussing its ancient roots and its influences over the medieval church architecture in general.

Landscape, Memory, and Architecture in Early Medieval Armenia

Christina Maranci (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

The churches of early medieval Armenia have long earned the attention of scholars for their form and structure; less attention, however, has been devoted to how they functioned within the landscape of the eastern frontier. Evidence from the epigraphic corpus, sculptural reliefs, and the architecture itself suggests that the monuments functioned as more than spatial envelopes for liturgical rites. Their richly engraved and carved exteriors were also settings for the fixing of noble jurisdictions and for the assertion and performance of official memory. As temporal and spatial loci, the churches constitute fertile and virtually untrammeled ground for the study of memory, time, and the landscape in the early Middle Ages.

The Yezidis: Towards the Sun

Birgül Açıkyıldız (Oxford University)

         The aim of this paper is to introduce the patrimony of the Yezidis within the framework of their architecture and funerary sculpture, spread across Northern Iraq, Turkey and Armenia.

          Today, almost all the Yezidi clergy, together with the great majority of the Yezidi population can still be found in the region in which they originated in Northern Iraq. While it is still possible to find some communities scattered here and there outside this area, it is here that the Yezidis were able, and knew how best, to safeguard their customs and traditions. It is here too that the Yezidis have been able to preserve and develop the architectural distinctiveness of their religious buildings. Nevertheless, the case of the small Yezidi communities in Turkey and Armenia was also of considerable interest to me. Here I will give a brief description of the very different lives of these same people, who acknowledge their common religion, while practicing it in very different ways.