The Miracle of Divriği

Acknowledgments

I started my observations and studies on the ornamentation of the Divriği Mosque after 1965. In the spring of 1967, my assistants in the Faculty of Architecture and I prepared a ground plan survey for the Divriği complex and documented it with photographs.  In the summer of that same year I lectured on the Divriği ornamentation as part of a Ph.D. seminar for the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. The nucleus of this book goes back to those days. Afterwards, I would visit Divriği whenever I had the opportunity and with great sorrow would observe these unique ornaments as they deteriorated, an absolute torture for the architect and the intellectual.  Despite all the struggles over the years to have the structure restored and converted into a museum, or to move its treasures to a museum and to organise its environs, a modern religious school and many apartment buildings have been built right next to it. The portals, which had been designed to symbolise heaven, are now at the mercy of time and air pollution. Alas, there has not been one politician endowed with the historical knowledge or the cultural will to present this structure as a gift to national history. At a small international gathering held at Divriği in 1986, as we sat there discussing the history of art against the background of these amazing masterpieces of shapes, we suffered helplessly watching them erode due to air pollution and the negligence of the locals. As much as this book is meant to explain my own judgements about Islamic and Turkish art of the Middle Ages, it is aimed at launching a campaign for rescuing the structure.
I would like to express my gratitude to Yılmaz Önge and Sadi Bayram who collected all the literature on Divriği in an anthology and published it in 1978; my special regards to Yılmaz Önge in particular for his thorough inspection of the structure as it stood then, perhaps for the first time with a preservationist architectural sense. I would also like to emphasise the contribution of the master sculptor Ali Teoman Germaner for his depiction of the Divriği ornaments. In his great passion for the Divriği ornaments he has depicted them with an independent sculptural quality and with great sensitivity. His participation quite animated me and I am honoured to have it. My special thanks to Prof. Dr. A. Yavuz for allowing me to use his drawings of the vault coverings of the Mosque and the Hospital, to Dr. Şirin Akıncı and her friends for preparing the illustrations for this book, Dr. Ayla Ödekan for her help in the preparation for publishing, Enis Batur, Çelen Birkan, and Güven Turan for their effort to publicise Divriği to a worldwide audience and preparation for the publishing of the book, the book’s editor Ahu Antmen, and to the executives of Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts Publications Inc. As to those who are heedless of the cultural significance of this structure, and who in their heedlessness fill the environment of that great structure with ugliness, I leave it to the more enlightened future generations to pass judgement on them; a judgement that is bound to be harsh.

Doğan Kuban
Istanbul 2001

• The Miracle of Divriği
• Divriği Mucizesi