Abstract
Kastamonu (Daday) Ertaş Village Mosque Wall Paintings and Current Conservation Status
It is crucial for all cultural heritages, whether they belong to ancient times or more recent periods, to be protected, documented and shared with the scientific and artistic community by investigating their characteristics. Notably, the village mosques that bore witness to a specific time become abandoned and neglected due to the migration of villagers to city centers. Therefore, those mosques disappear with the data of the witnessed time. This is why documenting the village mosque before they disappear is excessively important. This research has been performed for the purpose of documenting the current situation of the wall paintings of Ertaş Village Mosque, located in Ertaş Village of Kastamonu Daday country, determining the corruptions on the wall paintings and investigating the composition characteristics. The mosque and the wall paintings have been documented in detail and recorded by means of on-site examinations and by relaying information from local sources and archive researches both visual and written. Ertaş Village Mosque and the wall paintings that belong to the 1950s are historical artifacts close to the present. Ertaş Village Mosque, which has a high similarity of decoration with the wall paintings of some other village mosques in the region, features all the cultural, artistic and aesthetic characteristics of the region of that time. Since village mosques have a higher probability of disappearing quickly, the information recorded in the research will both be a source to the researchers who perform studies related to the wall paintings and the mosques in Kastamonu province and provide beneficial data for more scientific conservation and restoration in the case of further damages to the mosque and wall paintings. Therefore, the mosque and the wall paintings will be able to maintain their originality for years.
Keywords
Wall paintings, Ertaş Village Mosque, Decoration, Conservation, Restoration