Üçayaklı
Coordinates: 36 ° 39 ′ 38.5 ″ N , 34 ° 7 ′ 33.7 ″ E
Üçayaklı , also Üçayak , refers to a ruin site in the rough Cilicia in southern Turkey . It consists of a late Roman villa rustica with various outbuildings. A striking feature of the architecture of the main building are the circumferential double consoles on the first and partly on the second floor, which supported a balcony.
location
Üçayaklı is located in the Erdemli district of the Mersin province , about 15 kilometers northwest of the Erdemli district center and 45 kilometers west of the provincial capital Mersin . From the coastal town of Kocahasanlı a road leads via Üçtepe to the northwest, east parallel to the valley of the Limonlu river , the ancient Lamos, on via Arslanlı to Güzeloluk . In Arslanlı, another road branches off to the west, which leads via Hüsametli to Küstüllü . Between these two places lies the hamlet of Üçayaklı with a few houses and ancient ruins. The complex is located on an agricultural level with surrounding mountain slopes that were terraced in ancient times and were also used for cultivation.
Residential building
The main building is a three-storey building with a floor area of 8.55 × 14.97 meters, the total floor space was 264 square meters on three floors. The entrance is on the wide, north-facing side. The door in the western part of the wall is 1.57 meters wide and has a mighty lintel with a depth of 78 centimeters, in which recesses can be seen for the pivoting of the two door leaves. It is covered by a barrel-vaulted canopy supported by double decorated consoles . The porch is strongly reminiscent of the portals of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Korykos . The entrance leads to a 22 square meter anteroom. The beam holes in the south and west walls show that there was a staircase to the upper floor in the southern part of the room. In the southern rear wall, a modern door has created an outbreak. The lintel and arch of one of the earlier windows can still be seen above. In the northern part of the east wall is the door to the approximately 66 square meter main room. This was divided into three sections by two belt arches drawn north-south , the approaches of which with fighters are still visible. The room was illuminated by three windows in the north wall and two on the east side. Consoles on which the supporting beams of the storey ceiling rested have been preserved on the east and west walls.
The first floor has the same room layout as the ground floor. In the anteroom, the back wall, where the stairs led to the second floor, have no windows. The opposite south wall has a double-arched windows, separated by a double siphon with profiled pillar capitals . In the west wall there is a door in the middle that led to the balcony. This ran around the building almost completely, with the exception of a section in the western part of the southern wall. To the south of the balcony door on the west side there is a niche in the outer wall that served as a toilet. A stone water pipe runs from the roof between the door and the niche. It bends to the right at the level of the floor to the center of the niche and then continues into the floor. The rainwater from the roof flushed the pipes through; in the event of dryness, a bucket was probably used for rinsing. The balcony railing probably served as a privacy screen for the toilet. The main room could be entered through a door in the middle of the partition wall from the vestibule and, just as on the ground floor, was divided by belt arches. High arched windows in the north, east and south walls, which are now partially walled up, illuminated the room. The south wall has a window, the north and east walls each have a single and a double window, the dividing columns of which have a decor similar to that of the anteroom window. In the middle of each of the three outer walls, a door led to the balcony. On the south side, to the left of the door, where the balcony circuit ended, there was again a vertical water pipe from the roof to the level of the first floor. There, a porch covered the access to the surrounding courtyard, on which the water pipe continued as an open channel, leading down to the adjoining cistern at the end of the roof .
There are no remains of the second floor that suggest its structure. Its existence, however, is proven by the balcony consoles on the north side. Since they have no bracket holes, they must have been held by their own weight and that of the walls resting on them. On the north facade they are still completely in situ , the consoles of the remaining walls are in the fall, where their distribution suggests that the balcony also cut out part of the south wall here.
One can only speculate about the roof, because of the water pipes on the south and west walls, a hipped roof can be assumed. The masonry is double-shell. The outer layer consists in the lower half of the ground floor and at the corners of carefully smoothed large cuboids, the rest and the inner layer is bricked with small cuboids. The outer shell is 0.81–0.85 meters thick, the inner one is 0.71 meters thick.
West side with toilet niche and water pipe
South side with cistern
Anteroom with entrance and window on the upper floor
Main room to the east
Outbuildings
The cistern is about three meters southeast of the house, in between was the barrel-vaulted courtyard entrance, through which the cistern was fed from the roof inlet. It consists of three north-south oriented sections, each with a barrel vault and separated by arched walls. The entrance stairs are in the southeast. Outside, the east and north sides are equipped with blind niches .
About 50 meters southeast of the main building are the remains of another building, the western part of which has been almost completely demolished. It consists of three north-south facing rooms with a barrel vault. The entrance is in the east, the rooms are connected with through doors. Each room had an arched window on the north and south sides. The Christian archaeologist Ina Eichner, who researched the site around 2000, considers the building to be a bathing building. It was recently used as a residential building; a fireplace was installed in one of the rooms in the late Ottoman period. A free-standing gate can be seen between the bath and the cistern, from which it can be concluded that the entire estate with the outbuildings was surrounded by a wall.
About 50 meters west of the villa there was a pressing plant, possibly a wine press, as wine is grown by today's residents of the area. In the north of the main house the foundation walls of other buildings can be seen, but their function can no longer be clarified.
Cistern interior view to the southeast
Bathroom and yard gate
Interior of the bathroom
Foundation walls
Dating
The fighters of the belt arches on the ground floor of the house also resemble those from churches of the 5th and 6th centuries in their profile sequence. The double balcony consoles are strongly reminiscent of those at the Palace of Akkale , which according to an inscription can be dated to the late 5th century. Finally, the masonry shows parallels to houses in Işıkkale and Karakabaklı , which date from the 6th century, and to numerous Cilician churches from the 5th and 6th centuries. Eichner therefore dates the buildings in Üçayaklı to the 5th to 6th centuries. Later modifications to the main house, for example the subsequent installation of doors or the clogging of the windows on the upper floor, were probably carried out in the late Ottoman period.
literature
- Ina Eichner: Early Byzantine houses in Cilicia. Architectural history study of the types of housing in the region around Seleukeia on the Kalykadnos (= Istanbul Research Vol. 52). Wasmuth, Tübingen 2011 ISBN 978-3-8030-1773-4 , pp. 56-70.
- Ümit Aydınoğlu: The Farms in Rough Cilicia in the Roman and Early Byzantine Periods In: Adalya XIII 2010 pp. 245–246.
