Against Gravity

Suna Çağaptay

Full Paper
Building Practices and Cultural Interchange in Medieval Anatolia
Anatolia, or Asia Minor, dwells at the meeting point of East and West and evokes the motherland of both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. My paper focuses on the interaction of the architectural impulses of the Ottomans and other Anatolian princedoms (1308-1453) such as Menteshe, and Aydin (and the corresponding regions of Bithynia, Caria and Ionia), the meeting of Christianity and Islam, and the improved resources at artisans’ disposal as a result of Ottoman hegemony resulted in buildings that surpassed their predecessors in both originality and creativity.

As one of the most complex phases of the Anatolian history, the principalities period accommodates a number of significant transformations nourished by diverse cultural settings and indicate Mamluk, Latin, or Byzantine borrowings proving that these emirates were not immune to the complex cultural environment of the Mediterranean. Hence the built environment created under different principalities was a result of lively adaptation and creative innovation. Buildings executed represent a paradigmatic shift rather than a continuous evolution within a single regional idiom.