Sacred Architecture

The society which is going to be the concern of this paper is the Anatolian Society which once was famous with it's name “The Land of a Thousand Gods” in the sense that it was put into words by Trevor Bryce “This was a people, one might say, who never met a god they didn’t like.” (Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford University Press, 1998)) The architectural reflection of this richness is an indicator of social and cultural history of the Anatolian Society and they should be permanently maintained as evidence of this community's social and cultural history. These architectural structures include any kind of religious building such as: mosques, churches, synagogues, graveyards and other places of worship. Because of their religious beliefs, people cared a lot about the perfectness of these structures. They mainly thought these places as the houses for their gods. Considering the latest centuries in which the Muslim majority dominates the society, the mosque architecture has reached its peaks and Muslims blended in these structures whatever they have in their culture. And before Muslims dominate Anatolia, there were the Christians and their churches. Christians were also keen on their completeness of their religious structures. In the mean while we also encounter the Jews and their synagogues in many places of Anatolia. And if we go back to the early ages of the humanity we can still see such structures. As in the case of pyramids for Egypt, we learn history from the findings of tombs and cemeteries in Anatolia. Namely, i believe that religious structures should be maintained because they are the sustainable mirrors of the social and cultural history of the community in which they exist.

Today these structures, some are used as museums and for other touristic purposes or some of them still perform their original mission as a place of worship. Other than these purposes they also connect today's modern culture to the priors and exhibits the culture and technique to people who visit them. And for the future they will keep performing these missions most probably.

Consequently, in the light of the above mentioned considerations, i believe that religious structures are the perfect projections of cultural and social history of communities. They are eligible to be examined as an evidence and they are mostly still in their original use and some of them are now turned into museums. In the future they will certainly keep their religious and touristic values.