Karakilise

Karakilise — meaning Black Church in Turkish and Armenian — is a historic site in Turkey associated with an early Christian or Armenian ecclesiastical heritage, as this name was applied to several significant churches in eastern Anatolia and the Armenian highlands, most notably the ancient monastery known as St. Thaddeus or Qara Kelisa in the region that straddles the modern Iranian-Turkish border. In the Ottoman Anatolian context, sites bearing this name mark locations of significant Armenian, Syriac, or other Christian heritage, where ancient churches and the communities that maintained them left their mark on the landscape in place names persisting through centuries of demographic and cultural change. The site represents the multi-religious heritage of eastern Anatolia, where pre-Ottoman Christian communities built churches and associated bathing facilities in the same mountain valleys that subsequently became part of the Ottoman and later Republican Turkish cultural landscape.