6 Transformation of the ‘Sacred’ Image of a Byzantine Cappadocian Settlement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until recently, there were two popular misconceptions in the academic community related to Byzantine Cappadocia, the region in central Turkey: (1) that Cappadocia was a Byzantine monastic centre; and (2) that the history of Byzantine Cappadocia came to an end with the arrival of the Seljuks in the last quarter of the eleventh century. Accordingly, convinced of the inordinately generalised monastic identity of the region, scholars had initially categorised the settlement of Aciksaray in Cappadocia as a monastic site that dates back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, although literary and physical evidence is absent. At the other extreme, while advocating a secular purpose, Thomas Mathews and Anna-Christine Daskalakis-Mathews suggest that the inverted T-plan scheme and decorative elements of the rock-cut facades of those in Aciksaray and similar complexes in the region are secular Islamic in origin. The dual character of the settlement of Aciksaray, which apparently bears both Christian and Islamic features, is also strengthened by legends that put the settlement in connection with Haci Bektas Veli, the founder of the Bektasi Sufi order in the thirteenth century, who was settled in Sulucakarahoyuk (today Hacibektas), just 30 km north of Aciksaray. Aciksaray's diverse architectural vocabulary and entangled identities can be directly linked with its location between the Christian and Islamic worlds. Paying particular attention to this, and to the impact of prior scholarship on the formation of these identities, this chapter will discuss the invention of a ‘sacred’ Christian image of a secular Byzantine site that emerged on a medieval border, as well as the adaptability and transmission of this image of a non-Muslim site in an Islamic land up to the present day, through Aciksaray. Cappadocia is the name commonly given to a particular area in central Anatolia with boundaries that have been drawn and redrawn on many occasions throughout its history. Cappadocia can be defined as an area of unique geological formations that have been subjected over time to intensive rock-cut architectural activity (Plate 7). The boundaries of this idiosyncratic volcanic landscape can be marked by the contemporary cities of Aksaray, Nevsehir, Kayseri and Nicde in present-day Turkey (Figure 6.1).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".