Caves Of God: The Monastic Environment of Byzantine Cappadocia

by Spiro Kostof, Malcolm C. Carpenter (Drawings)

Cappadocia, a province in central Turkey, offers the traveler a startling rockscape whose cones, pleats, and folds conceal hundreds of monasteries and churches carved from the soft, porous "tuff" and used by Christian communities over nearly two millennia for shelter, burial, and sanctuary. This region in the Turkish hinterland is recognized as one of the centers of Byzantine mural painting. However, numerous hermitages, monasteries, and independent chapels dating from the seventh century onward reveal it also as one of the most concentrated areas of Eastern monasticism.This book serves a double it provides a thorough and lucid introduction to the rockcut churches and monasteries and their painted decorations, while it critically examines current scholarship on the monastic environment of Byzantine Cappadocia--particularly in regard to the architecture, which has been generally neglected by art historians.Scooped out rather than constructed, this anonymous architecture has its own unique appeal. Kostof "The Cappadocian carver-architect was not inhibited... by statics or the nature of materials. His structure stood, a monolith, before he started to work on it. And he could cut into this monolith quickly, effortlessly. It might take a single man about a month to carve out a large room of two to three thousand cubic feet. Loads and thrusts were negligible. One was free to try any structural symbol with little concern for structural safety. Cupolas could bubble from flat ceilings, or be placed over square bays by means of the most cavalier transition elemenis. No shape need be extemporaneous geometry is everywhere the rule. Wall lines sag, one half of an arch doesn't quite match the other, carefree deviations, here and there, mark the general outline of the building.Following an account of the region, its environmental, political, and religious history, the author discusses in detail the building types and painting programs in the context of their creation--answering such questions as what was the nature of monasticism in Cappadocia, and who were the builders, the artists, their patrons? The author was born and educated in Turkey, and his personal knowledge of the monuments is a convincing factor in his handling of chronological and stylistic uncertainties. Throughout, Kostof's mind's eye never leaves the total environment, observing the inseparability of landscape, buildings, paintings, and the ritual that informs them.

Genres: Architecture

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Spiro Konstantine Kostof was a leading architectural historian, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His books continue to be widely read and some are routinely used in collegiate courses on architectural history.

In 1993, following his death, the Society of Architectural Historians established the "Spiro Kostof Award," to recognize books "in the spirit of Kostof's writings," particularly those that are interdisciplinary and whose content focuses on urban development, the history of urban form, and/or the architecture of the built environment.

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew]

Kosof warns that his book is not a conventional guide; rather, it is a survey and critical assessment of the relevant scholarship for a wider audience. The significance of the subject is laid out in the preface to his second edition: "fifteen years ago [1973], the rockcut environment of Christian Cappadocia was still judged irrelevant to the development of Byzantine art and architecture – an insular, provincial episode of marginal interest... The massive documentation that has accumulated since then makes Cappadocia indispensable to Byzantinists of all stripes." Throughout, the book engages critically with the interpretations of Guillaume de Jerphanion, who explored the region from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Kosof's specialism was as an architectural historian, but the work also demonstrates a mastery of art history, with sections on the natural and social setting (including a sensitive account of monastic religious life, following the model of St Basil), the various kinds of buildings carved out of the soft tuff rock, and the famous cave church wall paintings. These paintings range from simple and crude folk art through to sophisticated forms that can be linked to paintings, manuscript illustrations, and texts from other contexts ranging from western Europe to Armenia.

The book contains many plans and schematics of particular buildings, although the illustrative material for the paintings could have been better; there are no colour plates, and it's frustrating to read detailed descriptions of paintings that appear only as barely adequate black and white reproductions, if at all. Of course, the internet means that this is less of a problem for today's reader; and anyone who visits the region (as I did last month) can also supplement the book with glossy full-colour guidebooks.

The back of the book contains a comprehensive catalogue of sites with bibliographic references.

[Paul Cassedy]

Although written in the early 70s, this book is still an excellent review of monastic architecture (particularly cave churches, of course) in Byzantine Cappadoccia (now in Turkey). Sadly, the color transfers of the pictures are not as brilliant as we are now accostomed to seeing; but they are well shot and beautifully illustrative. Even more sad is that the photos reveal that, with a few exceptions, the modern destruction-deteriorization of these incredible ancient monuments has continued apace in the years since this book was published.

[tudor]

i have GOT to go to Cappadocia