Associated Fellows
Anne Karahan, Senior researcher
Tel: +46 (0)8-661 50 07
Tel: +46 (0)70-662 40 75
E-mail: anne.karahan@gmail.com
Project: The image of God in Byzantine Cappadocia: an investigation of its relation to divine and human in fourth-century Cappadocian thinking.
The project is an interdisciplinary exploration of how Byzantine mural paintings in a number of churches at Göreme, Cappadocia, from the iconoclastic 8th-/9th-centuries to the 13th-century Latin Empire, depicted both that “God is” (not what God is) and that “God acts”. By means of a unique and new method Byzantine aesthetics will be mapped out on basis of dogmatic models of explanation of God´s transcendence (divinity, immateriality, invisibility), and God´s immanence (humanity, materiality, visibility) in texts by the 4th-century Cappadocian Fathers.
The project is supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation).
The Byzantine Cappadocia project
Marianne Boqvist, Senior researcher
E-mail: marianneb@sri.org.tr
The impact of Ottoman rule on Urbanism and Architecture in the Provinces of the Empire and how to preserve it: the case of Damascus
This project aims at increasing the knowledge and understanding of the formation of Ottoman provincial architecture, especially on the strategies of high-ranking Ottoman officials (Pashas) when founding pious foundations ( waqf ), in provincial urban and rural locations and how these have affected the formation of local Ottoman architectural styles. It studies two of the biggest foundations of the 16th century in the province of Damascus that include both urban and rural buildings; the waqf of Lala Mustafa Pasha and his wife Fatima Khatun and and the waqf of Sinan Pasha.