Early explorations of Cappadocia and the monastic myth

Abstract

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European travellers and explorers who discovered Cappadocia's exotic landscape of volcanic rock formations introduced the notion of a region populated by monks. Although written sources of the medieval period are silent in this regard, scholarship has persisted with this notion about the region ever since. Perhaps the general eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understanding of Byzantium as a period of decline following the Golden Age of Classical Antiquity reinforced the monastic interpretation. According to Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the later history of the Roman Empire in the east was ‘a uniform tale of weakness and misery.’