--KAPAK ARAÞTIRMA kopya - Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı

supplemented by a qualification of a monastic diakonia. The height of the lettering reaches
4 cm., the inscription is introduced by a well engraved cross written on top of the
initial epsilon; the letters show a square and circular shape, and three abbreviations
have been used. The well cut quality of letters, together with the high quality of the decoration
push toward a middle 6 th century date for this church furniture.
It cannot be, of course, inferred that the church of this monastery, whose hegoumenos
was Dorothaeus, has to be that of the oratory of St. Michael visited by Theodore
of Sykeon: the two villages, albeit called with the same name (Pidron/a), are different.
One last piece of information on this site. While visiting the modern village – all
around it there is farm land watered by a running stream - we noticed also a piece of
Medieval Byzantine decoration on the fountain of the upper Eleği 10.
Turning to the copious evidence of Early and Medieval Byzantine decoration coming
– one has per force to assume it – from the city of Antioch, we opt to present here
some samples of different kinds and dates.
a) 6 th Century Capital (in the 1924 depot)
This capital (white marble), numbered as 24 (albeit no reference is given in the
museum’s register), represents a well refined piece of church decoration (Fig. 2). The
total height is 35 cm.; the side of the abacus reaches 46 cm., the diameter measures
23 cm. The abacus shows four registers, respectively of 3, 3, 1.5 and 3.5 cm. high. Although
the capital has been (perhaps intentionally) cut in two parts, the one left shows
on its left upper broken part the full design. Four angular leaves of acanthus, well drilled
and perfectly spaced, gave rise to interlacing variations of smaller acanthus leaves
on the upper and lower parts of the capital. The central room showed a trapezoidal moulded
field closing a lily-motif (gigliato), surrounded by the small acanthus leaves. The
base, too, was decorated with smaller drilled leaves (the surface of this motif however
is erased). The technique shows good quality: the drilling depth close to the central motif
reaches 2 cm.; the angular leaves of the acanthus the drilling measures 1.8 cm., while
the motif at the bottom touches 1.4 cm. Little need be said about this type of capital:
widespread throughout the empire, it has remarkable prototypes in Constantinopolitan
examples of the 6 th century.
b) 10 th-11 th Century Capital (in the 1924 depot 11)
The capital is numbered A248, white with grey veins marble (Proconnesian?),
and was brought into the museum the 29 th of June 1963 from Görgü Mahallesi (Fig. 3).
The total height of the capital measures 25 cm. (4 cm. for the base), the upper width
reaches 36 cm., and the diameter at the bottom is 31 cm. The conservation of the piece
is discrete, although the upper and lower corner have suffered, being erased or
broken. The decorative scheme is given by four angular palmette leaves, very stylised,
filling the corners and bordering two couples of central decorations in oblong oval fields
12. The remnant fields give room to very simple, roughly carved abacus motif. The
skill produced on this capital reaches a certain quality only on the treatment of the angular
leaves, where the oblong palmette leaves show a sort of chiaroscuro due to the
depth of the engraving. A round moulding shapes the oval fields designed on the centre
of the four faces of the capital. Here the technique is very poor, and the execution
of the central pattern (palmette or flower with a massive engraving of the contours) is
10 Just outside the village, but within its territory, local farmers showed us a beautiful Roman sarcophagus with classical
capitals which were scattered all around the field.
11 As one can easily ascertain, to find a piece in the room classified as a "1924 depot" does not assure anyone about
the provenance of the piece, as the present case will show.
12 One might find analogies with this sort of decoration in M. Dennert, Mittelbyzantinische Kapitelle. Studien zur Typologie
und Chronologie [Asia Minor Studien, B. 25], Bonn 1997, 299a, 248 et passim.
13