Visualizing Community: Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia

This beautiful book, lavishly illustrated with more than 400 color photographs, examines the architecture of Byzantine Cappadocia (in central Anatolia) between the fifth and thirteenth centuries a.d. in four long chapters. The first chapter is a valuable and well-illustrated catalog of both built and rock-cut churches in the region. The second chapter examines the painted decoration of the rock-cut churches, primarily during a shorter period, the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. The third chapter covers domestic architecture, including many of the courtyard elite centers once identified as monasteries and subterranean refuges (the “underground cities”), from the fourth to the thirteenth century. The fourth chapter covers monasteries and tombs, with a detailed analysis of Göreme, probably the most famous part of Cappadocia. This chapter, which is more analytical than the previous three, contains an excellent discussion of the relationship between refectories and churches, and of Göreme as first a funeral-monastic complex...