GESİ NECİP ÖZALP EVİNDEKİ DUVAR RESİMLERİ

Central Anatolia is a land with a long history of wall paintings dating back to the Roman period. Many sites in Cappadocia and central Anatolia accommodate quite a number of spaces adorned with such paintings. They are generally two-dimensional, descriptive and usually of religious content. We also see wall paintings in the 18th and 19th century in large Ottoman mansions in the same region, just like the ones in İstanbul. In this paper, wall paintings of a room in a house in Gesi will be reported. Gesi is a village in Central Anatolia, on the northeast part of the city of Kayseri, which, in part, also has a Roman heritage. It is a sub-center in the vicinity, with a population of over 1500, well known for its beautiful surroundings and rich cultural background. Gesi is located within dense vineyards and orchards, with bird towers (İmamoğlu, Korumaz and İmamoğlu, 2005) and underground rock-hewn spaces (2). Its history goes back at least to the Hittites, who ruled the Central Anatolia between 2800 and 800 BC. Like other villages nearby, Gesi accommodated various ethnic and religious groups for centuries. Turks, Armenians and Greeks lived side by side in the vicinity for centuries and shared a colorful and productive social and cultural life. Churches are still standing near mosques, row houses, street fountains and bridges. The paintings examined here represent in a sense the continuation of a long tradition that survived in that vicinity. Some wall paintings still exist in volcanic-rock-hewn spaces in the region, near the village of Darsiyak (Figure 1). They are from the middle ages and are quite similar to those we come across in underground spaces in Cappadocia. After examining the still life and landscape paintings of the walls of a house built in 1825 in Göreme (in Cappadocia), Renda (1985) pointed out that those paintings were the products of a talented artist. Renda (1976) also examined wall paintings and decorations on the timber wall panels of the “başoda” (major room) of a house built in 1808 in Büyükbürüngüz (which is near Gesi). She stated that these paintings also reflected a high level of understanding of art and were at an advanced level that we may come across only in such cultural centers as Istanbul. The first author has also reported two- and three-dimensional wall paintings employed in the harem section of a konak in Darsiyak village, which is a few kilometers north of Gesi, as well as many in the town of Kayseri (İmamoğlu, 2002). Western-type paintings or paintings as “a new art form” representing a three-dimensional world, came onto stage in the 18th century in the late Ottoman period in Turkey. Arık and Renda, in their discussions of Ottoman paintings, linked (the art of) miniature paintings of Ottomans with the early wall paintings in buildings, and referred to the probable influences of the western paintings mainly on Ottoman miniature artists who might have passed through a transformation stage, and thereby have moved from two-dimensional to three-dimensional representation (Arık, 1976; Renda, 1977). Accordingly, the walls of palaces and mansions in the capital city were painted first by such European painters, who then influenced the local artists. Others, also, support this opinion in Turkey. For example, Orhan Pamuk, in his novel titled My Name is Red referred to a fierce struggle between the conservative and novelty seeker miniature painters in Istanbul approximately during the same period. Miniature paintings and abstracted decorations have, of course, a long history and were accepted by the Ottoman Muslim society. However, due to the conservative interpretation of the Muslim religion, Ottomans, after the Seljuk rule, somehow reduced or el,minated the representation of human figures in paintings and most of the art forms except miniatures. As a continuation of the same idea, the artists gradually were forced or required to paint only flowers and still life, or various abstractions of nature, which may be seen in palaces and some of the 16th and 17th century buildings in many parts of the empire, as well as in Kayseri (Eldem, 1984, 1982; Tomsu, 1950). For example, Güpgüpoğulları and Zennecioğulları konaks in Kayseri had examples of such wall paintings (İmamoğlu, 2006). Below, we examine the wall paintings of Necip Özalp House in the village of Gesi, which was selected because it was the only remaining one as discovered during a recent survey in the vicinity.