Turkey is a land of riches when it comes to religious art and architecture. From Greco-Roman temples, to sites mentioned in the Bible, to the region’s centrality during the Byzantine era, to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey is worth exploring.

The purpose of this photo collection is to provide images for students, faulty, members of religious groups, and armchair archeologists to use in presentations, reports, and papers. For the most part the images have not been cropped or edited and are thus not “professional grade.” Nonetheless, they should serve the purpose of providing basic illustrations. The bulk of the photos were taken by Duke Divinity School faculty member Dr. Beth M. Sheppard during a research trip in 2014 that was focused on sites of interest for study of the book of Revelation. As a non-professional photographer she used a simple “point and shoot” Samsung with a built-in 10x optical zoom. This initial visit to Turkey was followed by a study tour in 2015 that was co-led by faculty member Dr. Meredith Riedel. The second venture resulted in an expansion of the scope of the collection to include images of interest to those studying Byzantine Christianity as well as a few photographs of Mosques. During the 2015 trip Drs Sheppard and Riedel were accompanied by several Duke students whom they also encouraged to submit photos to further round out the collection. Quite a few shots were contributed by David Blankenberg, Allen Ingram, Sheldon Johnson, and Annette Rodriguez.

While every effort has been taken to correctly identify photos and catalog them using accurate keywords and metadata, given that the project resulted in better than a thousand items and involved multiple photographers, complete accuracy was difficult to achieve. Corrections are most welcome. They may be sent, along with the static URL of the photograph for which the modification should be made to the Duke Divinity School Library at divlib@duke.edu.

Citation Guidelines

Preferred citation for the digital version:

[Identification of item], [Name of Photographer],Turkey: Archaeology and Religious Sites Duke Divinity School Library, Duke University. [Item URL].

Copyright Information

Photographs in this collection are made available by a commercial use prohibited, attribution required, share alike, creative commons license (CC BY-NC-ShareAlike).