Why did the superstitious, local Turkish population scratch out the faces of the

Question:

Why did the superstitious, local Turkish population scratch out the faces of the images painted on the walls?

Question is regarding the Churches of G㶲eme, a complex of lushly painted cave churches hidden in the hillsides of Cappadocia, Turkey.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

It was due to a period of power struggle between the Christian 'Iconoclast' emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the Eastern Church. The Byzantine 'Iconoclast' struggle was a political conflict between the church and the state, with the army and the emperors on the iconoclast (image breaking) side, and the church, particularly the richer monasteries, on the image preserving side. The actual theological debate behind it centered on interpretations of the biblical ban on 'Graven Images', but it was really more about who ran the Byzantine Empire. Very few icons of the period survived, and in later years strict rules were adopted about the way in which saints faces could be depicted.

This opposition to depicting the faces of religious figures was incorporated into Islam (there are early Islamic pictures which do show the faces of Mohammed and other Islamic 'saints') and continued in the following centuries. The Goreme pictures date from the 10th or 11th centuries onwards. In later centuries the civil wars between the Greek and Turkish communities in Asia Minor contributed to the destruction or disfigurement of religious sites.