Leyla ETYEMEZ / Guliz Bilgin ALTINOZ
(Middle East Technical Technical University, Ankara, Turkey)
Abstract:
Towns with continuous inhabitation are the locus of the collective memory that has been generated by the formations, transformations and continuities in the urban form and use of space through history. Each culture in historical continuity, reshapes the urban topography in relation to the previous periods and their existing components. Thus, each time, a new urban space is created by defining a new integrity between former and latter elements of urban topography. However, mainly after the second half of the 20th century, this natural process of urban formation had been interrupted with the rapid urban development as well as the changes in technologies, tools and approaches of construction and planning . In most of the cases this resulted in the defragmentation and loss of different historical and archaeological layers that constitutes the collective memory and urban identity.
Based on this theoretical framework, in this poster, the historical continuity and urban archaeology of Amasya – a multi-layered historic town in the Northern Anatolia which embraces edifices from Hittite, Roman, Seljukid and Ottoman and Turkish Republican periods – will be analyzed and assessed. Focusing mainly on the problems of the defragmentation and loss of the components of urban form and historical stratification, this poster aims at identifying the physical, visual, and natural constituents of the collective memory, while discussing the strategies to re-constitute the fragmented and lost elements of historical continuity.
Keywords:
historical continuity, collective memory, multi-layered Anatolian towns, Amasya