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İ
Kemaliye
News Date: 01.12.2000
In the Munzur Mountains in eastern
Turkey is
the small town of Kemaliye, known in Ottoman times as
Egin. It lies on the River Karasu, a tributary of the
upper Euphrates, which over the ages formed a natural
barrier between the states warring for supremacy in
Anatolia. The valley of the Karasu, which in this region
is largely rugged and rocky, here widens slightly,
allowing the town a foothold. But the real source of life
for the town is the spring of Kadigölü at the foot of the
mountains. The streams fed by the spring wander all
through the town, along the edge of the streets and
beneath houses where they cool the larders; pour from
fountains in gardens, courtyards and squares,
occasionally forming pools and turning water mills; and
lend their background music to the singing of birds. The
earliest mention of the town in written records dates
from the 11th century, when it is thought to have been
founded.
Foreign travellers always spoke eloquently of the town,
as in the case of Helmuth von Moltke, who visited
Kemaliye in 1839 and described it as the loveliest town
that he had seen in Asia, equalled only by Amasya. The
limited amount of land available for farming and its
remoteness from the main trade routes were the main
factors in the social, economic and cultural destiny of
Kemaliye.
The town's wealth depended instead on the fact that the
men of the town were granted the right, by imperial
edict, to supply the Ottoman capital of Istanbul with
wood and coal, and were by tradition bankers to the court
and ruling classes.
From
a young age the men therefore worked in Istanbul, where
they became acquainted with the culture of this large
city, and later in life used the money they had earned to
build fine homes in Kemaliye. The women, who remained
behind, poured their yearning for their menfolk into
beautiful needlework and other handcrafts.
Kemaliye is one of few Turkish towns
to have preserved its late 19th century architecture, and
its beauty is enhanced by its magnificent setting in the
steep valley. Beyond the orchards and fields along the
river bank the town rises in terraces, the houses
interspersed with shops, mosques, churches, schools and
public buildings. Only at the point where the mountain
rears into a sheer rock wall do the buildings and
greenery come to an end.
Throughout its history Kemaliye was home to communities
of Turks and Armenians, and the architecture reflects a
synthesis of both cultures.
The traditional houses of the town are
set amidst dense greenery consisting of mulberry,
walnut, plane and poplar trees, providing one of the
loveliest illustrations of the harmony that can exist
between architecture and the natural environment.
Factors like the need to make economic use of the limited
land available and the harsh continental climate meant
that the houses were designed for compactness, and
instead of spreading horizontally, they rise vertically
in three, four and even five storeys.
However,
the terrain is so steep that each storey opens on to the
street or garden, with the result that the inhabitants
are not isolated from their environment as in modern
high-rise flats.Due to the extremes of climate, each
house has separate rooms for summer and winter use,
whatever the social class or ethnic origin of the
occupants, the houses of rich and poor varying only as to
the number of rooms, their size and distribution amongst
the floors. The area of the central room used for sitting
in is known as the divanhane, and the room for receiving
guests as the selamlik.
The selamlik is also known as the
direkli oda or 'pillar room', and forms a self-contained
apartment with its small kitchen for preparing coffee and
its own outside entrance. Each house has two kitchens,
one for the preparation of meals and another large one
known as the tandir yeri for preparing and preserving
foodstuffs for the long winter. In addition there is a
larder, a cellar, lavatory, byre, and store for straw.The
steep terrain means that the main rooms of every house
command a spectacular view of the river to the east, no
house blocking the view of another.
The
eastward facing façades therefore have the most windows,
and smaller stained glass above the main windows. On
every floor there is a jutting bay, whose size indicates
the importance of the room to which it belongs. In this
carefully graduated hierarchy the most protruding bay
belongs to the divanhane, which is the main living-room
in summer, and the next to the selamlik, followed by the
other rooms. The façades are symmetrical in their design.
The outer surface is then clad with
good quality pine boards arranged vertically. The lower
edges of these boards are decoratively cut or carved. The
wooden shutters over the windows consist of two sections
hinged at either side, and sometimes a third horizontal
section. These have wrought iron fittings, and when
closed the only light admitted into the rooms is through
the ornate upper windows. A wooden parapet surrounds the
top floor, part of which consists of a flat pebbled
terrace known as rihtim or yetme. Here fruit, herbs,
sheets of boiled fruit known as pestil, and a dough of
flour, yogurt and various other ingredients known as
tarhana are dried in the hot sun during the summer.
Opening onto this terrace are rooms known as kaçak used
for storage or for sitting during the summer.
The door-knockers of Kemaliye's traditional houses are an
interesting feature of the façades. They consist of two
parts, one for use by men which produces a deep sound,
and the other for women which produces a higher pitched
sound.
These distinctive houses in their spectacular setting are
fascinating examples of the v
aried
architecture of Ottoman Turkey, reflecting local culture
and climatic conditions in their design and structure.
Source: Associate Professor Berrin Alper is a lecturer at
Yildiz Technical University Faculty of Architecture,
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