The Decoration of Cave Churches in Cappadocia under Selcuk Rule

The churches of interest to this present study belong to an 'exotic' and ambiguous group as they are not only located in the enigmatic province of Cappadocia but also date to the Selcuk period. These churches not only mark the strangeness of a Christian community under Muslim rule, but have also provided historians an outlet for views regarding the Greek community and their acculturation under Turkish rule. These readings have distanced these works from a notional center-embodied in a largely imaginary Nicaea or Constantinople- rendering them 'provincial.' In so doing, they have neglected or undervalued the new center, the Selcuk capital of Konya, which re-orients the visual culture of the region towards the traditions of the Selcuk kingdoms to the east. This change complicates and challenges any rigid distinction between Greek and Orthodox, Selcuk and Islamic as categories for the description of the works of art produced in thirteenth-century Cappadocia. It is this dissolution of boundaries that is the subject of this thesis.