In this vast and open land, it's not often that one meets up with another person but here we were and there was a huge group hiking in the vicinity. We would all end up in this fascinating rock-cut church. They spoke French. It is good to know that people from all over the world is here.
Though cut into the rock, it had man made construction elements like this brick work archway that is falling apart.
This reminds me of some of the free standing Byzantine churches near Cappadocia in an area called 'thousand and one churches', an area where the famed British explorer, Gertrude Bell did a lot of excavation and documented in her book of the same name. Towards the end, she became so distraught about war and the state of the antiquities in the Mesopotamia region that she took her own life. This reminds me of her pictures she took of the churches that were crumbling in front of her even as she surveyed them. There were frescoes inside this church, badly damaged ones, with faces and eyes scratched out, maybe during the iconoclast period. The surprising thing is the iconoclast period was perpetrated by Emperor Leo who, himself was from Cappadocia. He so wanted to please the Orthodox church officials in Constantinople that he persecuted his own people, the people in Cappadocia, from whence he came.
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