Wooden ornaments in the mosques of Artvin city Borçka and Hopa districts

Artvin is located in the Eastern Black Sea region and founded on a quite mountainous area and our subject districts Hopa and Borçka are at the seaside and in the inner part respectively.The mosques in the Borçka and Hopa belong to the Ottoman age and they are all small scale village mosques built in the 19th century.Although, some of these architectural works were examined by some researchers, there are still works which are not registered by the foundations. As we think that these structures, which are important in the Art History viewpoint, are not sufficiently examined and introduced, we directed our efforts to the study titled ?Wooden Ornaments in the Mosques of Artvin City Borçka and Hopa Districts?. First of all, after examining the previous publications and archive documents related with the subject, the detection procedure is completed by examining the existing works and documenting them by taking their photographs. Then, the detailed definition of each work is made in the systematically prepared catalog. In the comparison and evaluation section, the position of all the works in the Turkish Art History was tried to be defined by putting forward the similar and different aspects of them in themselves and with different structures.In our research, 10 pieces of Mosques are handled built in the 19th century. Among these works, the ones located in Borçka are completely made of wooden material and the ones in Hopa are built by using the wooden frame filling technique. Because of unconscious repairs some of these works, each having rich wooden decoration, lost their original condition. The engraved decorations on the door, pulpit, altar, sermon stand and mahfel (screened and elevated loge in a mosque) surfaces are quite striking. Particularly, it is one of the few examples in which baroque and rococo styles were applied in the small village mosques in Anatolia.Borçka Muratlı (Maradit) Village Mosque can be qualified as the greatest mosque built in this region and it comes forward with its richer wooden elements having better workmanship. The decoration program we see here are quite different from the other structures. Other than these, most of the other structures are quite similar in the decoration program. Particularly, `S? and `C? curled branches and acanthus leaves, which we qualify as the baroque period characteristic, are commonly used in all the structures. Other than this, large rosettes and medallions are also frequently encountered motifs in the works that we examined. The ship, fruit, dagger, arm and escutcheon descriptions engraved on the pulpit in Borçka, Muratlı (Maradit) Village Mosque are rare motifs we couldn?t see in the other works of the region.