Sacred spaces

I’ve been home for about a month now and it’s been strangely challenging coming back to New York.  Not because of the jet lag, but more due to the culture shock. Airplanes have allowed us to cross huge distances with relative ease, but I don’t think our bodies and minds are as quick to transition.  Well, at least mine aren’t.

In any case, I am starting to feel myself back in my NYC life and have already began to plan a new trip in August to New Mexico.  Being in Cappadocia helped me to realize how meaningful certain types of landscape can be to me and I am going to New Mexico to see if some of the terrain there will inspire me as well.  I do feel though that there are a couple of more things about Cappadocia that I want to share before I sign off on that adventure to start the next. 

So, on that note, here are some images of a phenomena I saw quite often while visiting the churches in Cappadocia.  The photos show some examples of the excessive vandalism of  the paintings and frescos at many of the sites.  

As I said in an earlier post, many of the eyes of the saints have been scratched out.  There are many theories about why this happened although no one really knows for certain.  Most people say iconoclasm, religious beliefs or fear of spirits as some of the reasons.  I am guessing that most of these are true to some degree. 

Although the more I looked at the destroyed frescos I could see that not only the eyes were scratched out.  There was also big gashes in the walls, violent looking cuts to the surface as well as more recent graffiti.  Clearly a lot has been going on throughout the years in response to these images.

I don’t know when or why  these marks were made.  What I did see though was a lot of feeling and emotion.  These spaces clearly gave people a free space to express something visceral and deeply personal. 

Like the skin of our bodies, the walls of these caves, display the marks of time.  And just as our bodies tell the stories of our lives, these churches are the collective body of everyone who has passed through, archiving the history of multiple civilizations.  In this sense, these churches truly felt like sacred spaces.