A Donor’s Legacy

The other day, I visited the Cappadocian Cave Churches in Göreme, Turkey.

These cave churches have frescoes from the 9th and 11th centuries.

In one of the churches, I found a few graves (pictured above) containing skeletons of those purported to be the donors who paid for the chapels and paintings.

In some of these paintings, the donor was depicted in the religious art. This is a feature I had seen in many Renaissance paintings, but not from such an early period as these chapels.

I still find the information of these sites quite scarce and speculative, but it was interesting to consider nevertheless how longstanding are these donors’ legacies!