12/5/2018 0 Comments Bonus article: Göreme, Turkey. The Open Air Museum of Göreme is a UNESCO World Heritage site near the town of Cappadocia in Turkey. I have added Göreme to the exhibit at the last minute, despite it not being included in the catalog of this year's coursework. I had made the decision to include it after I stumbled upon Göreme's existence whilst watching at home a recent airing of a 'Rick Steeve's' travel episode. While viewing the manmade subterranean world, that was begun nearly four thousand years ago, an idea struck me that when nature has provided similar surrounding of cliffs or hillsides made of pliable rock, humans across the globe have a tendency to independently utilize comparable rock boring techniques to create both dwellings and places of worship that can pass the test of time. The Göreme area is famed for both the naturally formed 'Fairy Chimneys' and the hand carved troglodyte town that has been continuously carved into the soft volcanic rock of the surrounding slopes since the Hittites first settled the area around 1800BC. In their time the caves have housed early Christians seeking refuge from Roman persecution, monasteries and mosques and was continually inhabited up until the early 1950s. The artwork of the Byzantine churches, with almond eyed saints portrayed simply in their robes offering gifts to God the most famous of which are is the eleventh century dark church of Karanlik Kilise, bare a striking similarity to those frescos found five and a half thousand miles away in the Coptic mountain churches of Ethiopia.
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11/17/2018 0 Comments Great Zimbabwe The city of Great Zimbabwe is in the south eastern hills of Zimbabwe, it is considered a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. It is made up of three sections; the Great Enclosure and the Hill & Valley complexes which all together make it the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert and second oldest ruin in the southern half of Africa. Great Zimbabwe was constructed and lived in by up to 18,000 members of the Gokomere culture, ancestors of the local Shona people between 1000A.D and up to 1400A.D. The hilltop city is made from locally sourced drystone blocks that are visually akin to the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in the USA as the Shona people constructed the buildings directly into recesses naturally available in the rock face. The colors of the materials used help the structures blend visually into the surrounding landscape and the living quarters and structures such as tower granaries do bear a striking resemblance to those found at the cliff dwellings of the Puebloans. Another similarity is that it too was abandoned in the mediaeval era due to drought.
Such is the historical significance of these ruins, that when the country became independent from Great Britain in 1980 it renamed itself from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe after this city. 11/17/2018 0 Comments Mesa Verde National ParkLocated in southern Colorado, a State in the Mid-west part of the USA. Around six hundred cliff dwellings including whole villages with storage rooms, watch towers and granaries were built over nearly a hundred year long period between the early 1200s and 1300A.D by the ancestral Puebloans who called the Mesa Verde (Green Table) National park area home for a seven century long period between approximately 550A.D and 1300A.D. The area is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as it is the largest archaeological site in the USA with more than 4,300 sites of historical interest. The naturally occurring alcoves and overhangs that line the canyon walls provided shelter from both the extreme heat of summer and the biting cold of the driving snow storms in winter. Some of the overhangs were blessed with natural springs that provided a precious supply of water in an otherwise typically arid region of the USA. The buildings which are occasionally multi storied were constructed of local sandstone blocks and plastered with adobe, when viewed from the opposing side of the canyon the colors of the locally sourced materials help the structures blend into the landscape. Many are not easily accessible indicating that they may well have been constructed to keep the occupants and the food stored within safe from invasion and theft. In a similar style to the way that the city of Great Zimbabwe was made by utilizing locally sourced materials that were then built into the available openings of the natural rock face, they both had similar features such as granary towers and a shared visual aesthetic of blending into their surroundings, these two settlements were also both occupied up until about the same period in time. The Puebloans had emigrated south to Arizona and New Mexico by about 1299 after a very cold period that coincided with a great drought. 11/17/2018 0 Comments Longmen Grottoes The Longmen caves are situated in the north east area of China. The caves have been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The first carvings were started in the late 400s and continued through to the mid 700sA.D. There are now 110,000 statues of Buddha and his disciples carved into 2,300 niches along a 1Km long limestone cliff. There are also sixty stupas and many steles throughout containing just under 3,000 inscriptions. Over the three hundred years that the grottoes were carved into, there came to be two distinct styles of art that were formed; initially there was the Central China Style and then later on came the Great Tang Style, both of which are reputed to have influenced many other fine artworks throughout Asia.
The Buddhas who have not been placed there, but were each and everyone hewn in situ from the living rock wall either sit in tranquil poses with their hands and feet set in various poses that symbolize what particular state of meditation they are in or they stand tall watching placidly over the devotees that come on pilgrimage to the site. Some carvings depict medical treatments while others relive mythical stories of Buddha trampling evil. The style of the deep relief statues are soft, smooth and elegant with some careful attention given to showing limited movement and balance, the clothes worn are stylized as flowing drapes that tend to follow repeated parallel lines. The Buddha is consistently shown with a halo shining behind his head, to illustrate his holiness. Important figures are typically monumental in size, and centrally located within each scene, while the minor characters are, while still grand, carved to a smaller scale and when necessary portrayed stacked in rows one atop another. In the Wan-Fo-Tung cave that has 15,000 unique carvings of Buddha there is a Buddha depicted that is only 2cm (or three quarters of an inch) tall, but on the whole the immense size of not only the sculptures, but the entire edifice stir emotions of awe and wonder from the viewer, similar to the ginormous proportions of Abu Simbel in Egypt. 11/17/2018 0 Comments Abu Simbel Abu Simbel is located on the shore of Lake Nasser in the south of Egypt, near the Sudanese border. It is comprised of two temples that were carved directly into the local rock, it took twenty years to create between 1264B.C and 1244B.C however during the years between 1964 and 1968A.D they were both moved to a man made mountain to avoid flooding during the making of a nearby dam and reservoir. At sixty six feet tall, all four of the gigantic statues sat on their thrones lined outside the entrance of the larger temple represent the then ruler Rameses II. Nine members of his family are represented by smaller standing statues carved between the legs of each seated colossus. Inside there is a grand corridor lined with eight more titanic statues representing the pharaoh along one wall he wears the crown of upper Egypt and along the opposite wall he wears the double crown representing both upper and lower Egypt. The smaller temple is a solitary example in Egyptian art of a Pharaoh and his queen being of equal importance; as the six statues outside of the smaller temple represent both Rameses II and his wife queen Nefertiti, who inside the temple and out are consistently of equal size to each other. Inside the smaller temple they are both shown being equally attentive, either playing music or offering gifts to appease their gods. The rulers are always seen by a side view, placed centrally in the scene and surrounded on either side by their gods who despite being on a raised dais are consistently smaller than either of the two rulers. While the Abu Simbel statues share the awe inspiring size of the Longmen statues these were carved millennia before the Buddhist grotto statues and unlike those in China these Egyptian figures were created less for religious purposes, rather than to show the great might, power and prestige of Egypt's then ruler to its southern neighbours. The focus of the carvings is on Rameses II offering gifts to his gods, rather than the gods themselves, the Pharaoh and his queen are both solidly carved, without any outstretched limbs, the detail of their royal regalia is minimal at best, as are their facial expressions as they both gaze in a frozen, emotionless stare out into the distance of eternity. Here is a link to a documentary following the dismantling, moving & rebuilding of the temple of Rameses II
https://youtu.be/2SxLufRZr4c 11/17/2018 0 Comments Lalibela Lalibela is in the mountainous north of Ethiopia. The Christian churches have been listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Built between 1181A.D and 1221 the eleven churches in this small area are all rock cut monoliths. Each church has been mined out of rock to the depths of several stories, similar in technique to the way the Ellora temple in India was created. The churches are accessible via side channels and tunnels also cut down into the solid rock. Each of the eleven churches are unique to one another, but sharing the same aura of solid sturdiness. The church of St George featured in the photograph above is in the form of a cross and considered to be the finest of the eleven. The link takes you to a video made by the BBC about Haylesilassie Kahsay a Coptic Christian priest and the 6thC Saint Abuna Yemata church that he cares for which is carved high up into a cliff in the Gheralta mountains of northern Ethipia: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p05yb46x/this-man-scales-a-250m-cliff-each-day-to-get-to-work
11/17/2018 0 Comments ElloraEllora is located in the State of Maharashtra in the mid west part of India, it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site was carved constantly between 600A.D and 1000A.D into a one and a half mile long basalt rock hillside. It contains thirty four temples and monasteries dedicated to three different religions; Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. It has within it the world's largest rock cut monolith in the world.
Ellora contains similar features to both Abu Simbel and the Longmen Grottoes with monumentally huge sculptures hewn from the living rock and the technique used in the Ethiopian complex of Lalibela of creating a religious building by burrowing down into a hillside of solid rock. Of the six items chosen for this exhibition Ellora shows the greatest attention to detail with artwork carved upon every available surface, often just for the sake of beauty and symmetry rather than for the purpose of telling a narrative. While many of the gods and saints sit and stand in familiar poses, seen at the Longmen Grottoes, many other carved figures are shown in poses with far more movement than those at any of the previous five locations. In one temple Shiva may be seen doing battle with an army of demons, his arms waving his war clubs in the air at his terrified foes, elsewhere in a Jain temple the three worlds of Earth, Heaven and Hell are represented by a god holding up a king who is relaxing with his arms entwined with his lover's embrace, while a statue at another shrine may either show a grinning evil spirit disemboweling a victim or it may show a beautiful goddess dancing freely in front of her loyal attendants, all with an attempt to gain a realistic representation of how the body looks in motion. |
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