The Byzantine Mosque at Trilye: A Processual Analysis of Dominance, Sharing, Transformation and Tolerance

Abstract

This paper analyses the history and current utilization of an edifice in Northwestern Anatolia that was constructed in the eighth century as a Byzantine church, converted into a mosque in the sixteenth century, back into a Greek Orthodox church from 1920 to 1922, and has been a mosque again since 1923—this is the “Byzantine mosque” of our title. By looking at the building not simply as a Byzantine church that has undergone changes but as a long‐term locus of interaction between Christians and Muslims, we address criticisms in History and Anthropology of a model of “antagonistic tolerance”, or competitive sharing or religious sites, that we are developing in a multidisciplinary comparative project. More importantly, we also show why the customary scholarly practices of studying time‐delineated horizons, ethnographic presents, or other “units of contemporaneity” (Rowe 1962) are inadequate, as they not only block understanding of the trajectories of specific historical processes, but also hinder comparative study. In so doing, we hope to achieve the goals of historical particularism while still facilitating comparative study.