Endnote 2 – Monasteries?

In 1985, Lynn Rodley was the first to record the larger context of the Cappadocian churches by including the layout of halls, courtyards and utilitarian rooms attached to the churches. She also concludes that the original context was monastic (Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985]). More recently, Thomas Mathews and Annie Christine Daskalakis-Mathews have proposed that nine of Rodley’s courtyard sites without refectories are actually mansions that exhibit plans common in contemporaneous domestic architecture of the Islamic world, with which Byzantine civilization in this area of the empire had extensive contact (see “Islamic-Style Mansions in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Development of the Inverted T-Plan,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56 [1997], pp. 294–315). In a recent survey at Canli Kilise, in western Cappadocia, Robert Ousterhout has documented a 6-mile-long village composed of 25 complexes, each arranged around a courtyard and each with a separate chapel; only one of the complexes has a rock-cut refectory and is thus defined as a monastery.