ceylan karaca
hacettepe unıversıty
She has a BA degree in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University. She completed her Master’s Thesis at the same university in the Department of History of Art, under the heading “The Church of Saint Barbara in the Göreme Valley in Cappadocia”. She carried on her doctoral studies on the same region with special interest on the (micro) history of the region, donors and settlement types. Through scholarship she had the opportunity to exchange her ideas with various scholars abroad. In 2019 she completed her dissertation titled “The Powerful and the Aristocracy in Cappadocia as in the Example of the Soganlı Valley”.
Mighty in Medieval Cappadocia: House of Skepides
The talk drives its topic from her doctoral dissertation. The presence of three inscriptions in three different churches in the Soganlı Valley in Cappadocia and the evaluation of the valley as a Byzantine village constitute the main problematic of the talk (and of the thesis as well). The donor and supplicatory inscriptions not only indicate that a powerful person entered the village at the beginning of the eleventh century at the latest, but also evince that the village changed hands between two powerful households at a certain point at that century. These two powerful oikoi, one of which is the house of Skepides, exemplify the change in the balance of power in the eleventh century. What exemplifies the tenth century of the village is a formation of five churches which looks more like a formation open to the use of the whole village. Dr. Karaca will try to use historical data to approach the valley as a piece of land controlled by and changed hands between the powerful.