Date

2023-1-03

Author

Ballıoğlu, Tuğba

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Rural landscapes, formed by the interaction between human beings and nature over hundreds of years, are reflections of social structures that shape, use and transform them in the past and present. As cultural heritage, rural landscapes embrace not only physical attributes but also cultures, traditions, practices, expressions of local communities’ identity and belonging, and values and meanings attributed to those areas by the inhabitants. However, rural settlements, shaped to be in harmony with their geography, have faced economic, social and environmental challenges in line with developing technology and changing needs. Population loss in rural areas as the effect of ‘modernization’ constitutes an important issue all over the world. Depopulation results in the neglect, gradual deterioration and eventual destruction of traditional environments created through traditional methods, accumulated knowledge and cultural practices, whilst this also causes the loss of the intangible values that are integral components of rural heritage. Rural areas that survive without these components thus lose their identities as ‘living systems’. Considering the changing lifestyles and socio-cultural, economic and physical threats to rural areas, preserving their heritage values is of great significance. Accordingly, rural heritage has been the subject of ever-increasing international and interdisciplinary research over the past years since rural landscapes are subject to continuous and irreversible transformation processes. Safranbolu, located in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey, is a significant historic town included in the UNESCO World Heritage List due to its outstanding universal values. Each village of this town has cultural and natural values in itself with its local and site-specific characteristics, settlement fabrics, agrarian structures and fertile lands. Some of these settlements have managed to better preserve their rural identity, while some have completely lost it. Hacılarobası is one of Safranbolu’s relatively well-preserved historic rural settlements. This village includes a wide range of heritage assets from historic buildings to archaeological remains and has distinctive features from the other traditional settlements in the region. Even so, Hacılarobası, a Yörük village, has lost a significant part of its population and become a predominantly abandoned settlement. Since the village has preserved its original physical characteristics to a great extent but is exposed to the risk of complete abandonment and thus losing its tangible and intangible values, it is selected as a case study within the scope of this thesis. This study, structured around Hacılarobası, is based on the field surveys undertaken to better understand the local characteristics of this area and identify the values and opportunities of and threats to this place. This thesis argues that the conservation of rural heritage values as a whole is possible only through the continuity of the local communities’ relationships with their environment and adaptation to the changing living conditions respecting these values. Accordingly, it aims at developing a sustainable conservation approach for the village of Hacılarobası. In this regard, a set of conservation principles and site-specific proposals based on the values and opportunities of and threats to the village are developed in order to keep the current inhabitants in place and revitalize rural life.

Subject Keywords

Hacılarobası (Safranbolu), Rural landscape, Historic rural settlement, Conservation of rural heritage, Rural depopulation

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102566

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis