Ortaçağ Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

One of the historical geographies where Christianity developed from the early periods right after its birth is the Turabdin Region, which covers today's Mardin Province and its surroundings. As the ancient Assyrian community living in this region started to adopt this belief before Christianity was declared as an official religion, faith-based architectural structuring also started to show itself from early dates. In the early periods of Christianity, worship; as it is seen as prayer, purification and seclusion, the clergy preferred places far from the society and settlements in order to achieve this purpose. In the history of Christianity, various hermitage towers were built, which developed depending on the monastic structures established in places hard to reach and mountainous areas and where people who devoted themselves to religion coexisted and served more ascetic currents. The believers, who try to be alone and thus find peace by trying to break their ties with the world for the religion and God they believe in, have started to display an extraordinary life in these hermitage towers, fiercely opposed to their bodily desires and egos. In this article, we present an evaluation of the hermitage towers in monasteries, which are a reflection of the Christian mystical belief and have been identified as a result of the archaeological surveys we have carried out in the Turabdin region. The two columns of isolation in the Mor Lo’ozor and Mor Ya’kup Monasteries, which we discovered as a consequence of our archaeological studies in the Turabdin region, have been analyzed according to the discipline of art history in this article. A comparison was done in the columns of solitude, taking into account the origin of the tradition of the column of seclusion and its reflections in the surrounding art environment. The article concludes with a broad evaluation of monastic isolation columns, which are a reflection of Christian mystical thought.