I’ve been mulling for days how to handle the rock church postings. Much of the same thing I shot is here http://www.goreme.com/forgotten-cave-churches.php and shown with more attention and skill. While it was meaningful to me to see how frescos were handled during the iconoclast periods and afterwards as they made sense for me of the living out of the decisions of Nicean and other ecumenical councils, let’s face it– you kinda had to be there. And give a care to begin with. And yet those spaces, like all spaces sprung from architectural artistry and feats of engineering, are liminal, opening the possibility to e experience the intersection of imagination and natural law, the very stuff of religious experience. And so I include only those images that capture the clearest representation of that experience. Our visit to the column church, the single example where the carved columns were fully embraced by negative space rather than merely carved as relief representations within a still intact wall of rock. And on the matter of churches, I’ll leave it at that.