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Traditional
Safranbolu houses
Safranbolu is the
best preserved town in Anatolia. A rare blessing for those who would
like to picture how an Ottoman town looked 200 years ago, Safranbolu,
with its little-changed cobbled pavements and authentic marketplace
is a virtual open-air museum.
The sloping terrain
at Safranbolu, which is situated in a deep canyon carved out by
three rivers, produced interesting architectural solutions. The
stone-built ground floors of Safranbolu houses, most of which are
two- or three-storey mansions, generally follow the natural gradient
of the street. The upper stories meanwhile, supported by buttresses,
may project over the street. Although the houses are built on small,
oddly shaped lots, thanks to this building technique the upper level
rooms are nevertheless rectangular and spacious. Another aspect of
the technique is that the house’s axis can be rotated slightly on
the upper stories according to need or exposure to the sun! The
houses along the narrow streets of the marketplace thus rise
twisting and turning like screw shells over the narrow and sloping
plots of land to which they cling.
The interiors of the
houses are as elegant as their exteriors. The low-ceilinged middle
stories used in winter are cozy and warm like a womb while the upper
floors, used in summer, are airy with high ceilings. The master
bedroom, the most beautiful room with the best view, is usually
situated on the topmost floor. This room, decorated with woodwork
and stenciling, is where the master craftsmen exhibited all their
skill. In typical Safranbolu houses, each room was furnished in such
a way as to meet all the needs of the nuclear family. It is not for
nothing that Safranbolu residents called each one of these rooms a
‘house’ since they could be a sitting room in the daytime thanks to
divans running around the wall, simultaneously a kitchen thanks to
the hearth, a bedroom thanks to the floor mattresses taken out of
the cupboard at night, and a bathroom thanks to the washstand
concealed in the cupboard! Because they were designed as independent
units, each of the rooms was assigned a name such as ‘storage
house’, ‘guest house’ or ‘dining house’.
During the years
when Safranbolu was becoming a popular destination for tourists,
there was a constant stream of visitors to the traditional houses.
The house owners, who at first welcomed the tourists hospitably,
naturally tired of this human traffic with time. But just at that
point the museum houses came to the rescue. The first of them, and
perhaps the most beautiful, is the Kaymakamlar Evi, a house that was
opened to visitors in 1981 following a restoration by the Ministry
of Culture. This mansion is one of the most flawless examples of the
Safranbolu house. Meanwhile the Turing Havuzlu Konak, or Mansion
with Pool operated by the Touring Club of Turkey, which began
serving guests in 1989, is the first historic mansion in Turkey to
have been converted into a hotel. The nicest surprise of this
mansion, which greets visitors at the entrance to the town and was
once owned by one of its wealthiest families, is the approximately
1.8 meter-deep pool that holds several tons of water in the living
room—restored and used as a café today.
Reference
Ozgur Gezer/Garo
Milosyan, SKYLIFE.
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