Stone artisans of the Southeast Anatolian city:
landscape, masonry tradition and architectonic culture
Collaborators: Ersan Ocak, Ömür Harmansah, Aras Özgün
Project description
The cities of Southeastern Turkey are renown for their extraordinary workmanship of cut-stone masonry. The abundance of limestone and basalt sources in the region south of the Eastern Taurus mountains, particularly on Urfa and Mardin plateaus, foothills of Adıyaman region and the Diyarbakır basin has allowed the prosperous dwellers of large towns in the region cultivate an exceptional local tradition of building in stone for several centuries. The urban landscapes of the cities like Mardin, Midyat, Urfa and Diyarbakır exhibit the impressive fabric of a distinct architectonic culture of finished and unfinished stone surfaces. The making of this built environment largely relied on the work of the local craftsmen, in particular the stone masons. Even though the introduction of the “modern” building techniques may have considerably impacted the long-term building tradition in the area in the last few decades, a number of stone artisans continue to work as probably the last generation of such craft activity. The main purpose of this ethnographic study is to document the stonemasons themselves, as bearers of a craft tradition. The focus of research will be the role of the stone-working craftsman in the formation of the townscape through the massive corpus of his artisanal knowledge, that has been locally (re)produced for centuries. In a rather larger scope, we will attempt to produce a comprehensive (visual) survey of the making of a historical built-environment, not only through the craft of the artisan and his working techniques, but also by means of a spatial narrative that runs from the stone quarries of the rural hinterland to the architectural fabric of the urban landscape, and into the symbolic labyrinthine space of the geometric ornament.
Preliminary research on the masonry tradition in the region has revealed that there has been an elaborate division of labor among the stonemasons in the region. The makta (quarryman) quarries and roughly squares the stone blocks; while nahhat finely dresses the architectural blocks; as nakkaş applies the decorative schemes, and is responsible for the final finishing of the architectural elements; and finally binne/bennâ builds the walls, using the already produced dressed stones, based on the design of the building by mimar, the master-craftsmen (Aydın et. al. 2000: 426-27). The techniques of stone masonry has evolved in a slow pace since the North Mesopotamian Iron Age (ca. mid 12th to late 6th c. BC), when metal tools, such as picks, hammers, chisels, and pointed tools were started to be used extensively in stone-carving for architectural purposes and are still mostly part of the contemporary practice (Nylander 1970: 22-28). In the particular case of the Southeast Anatolian city, the stone workmanship seems to be a co-product of Christian and Muslim traditions, not only based on the Medieval Islamic (esp. Artukid and Ak Koyunlu dynasties) and later Ottoman architectural activity that was brought into the region but also carried on predominantly in the hands of the Syrian Orthodox, Nestorian, Melkite and Armenian communities. The complexity of craft specialization in the process of building, the transhistorical character of the masonry techniques and the multi-cultural basis of its historical character form the indisputable evidence for the sophisticated corpus of the building knowledge, as a historical assemblage of local architectural practices, that created its own “knowledge-space” in the urban environment. As David Turnbull (2000: 19-20) suggested in this work on the sociology of indigenous knowledge, the “knowledge spaces have a wide diversity of components: people, skills, local knowledge and equipment that are linked by social strategies and technical devices...” It is exactly the reading and deciphering of this eloquent knowledge space, this assemblage that our project intends to achieve.
It is well accepted that the skill of the craftsman is challenged by the limits of the material, ecological constraints, societal norms and the demands of his patrons, all of which he had to reconcile. A local aesthetics of construction is achieved as the making manifest of the intrinsic qualities and potentials of the raw material, and in the field of vernacular architecture, it points us to the relation between the technology and the appearance of buildings. Therefore a symbolically charged tectonic expression is not dissociated from its making, and derives its symbolism from the very act of its making. Primary ethnographic (visual and oral) documentation of the working techniques of various masons in the region will provide the core material for the documentary, to bridge the processual gap between the making, the craft activity and the cultural artifact, the built environment. The visual incorporation of the natural environment, that surrounds the urban life in the immediate hinterland of the cities and the landscape that supplies the source of this craft activity, i.e. the steppe-like arid landscape of the limestone massif and the volcanic/basaltic hills, the flat fertile basin of Diyarbakır, will supply the regional context for the study. Furthermore, the built urban landscape, as the ultimate product of this craft activity will also form the most readily available visual material to illustrate the architectonic quality of the urban spaces.
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