A “Solitary” Narrative in Context of Cultural and Spatial Identity: Kayaköy

Anatolian geography has hosted many civilizations which have been able to carry their beliefs, languages, customs and traditions, lifestyles and traces as original pieces in the multicultural mosaic of Anatolia. These "ancient" values, which have been transferred to the present day as cultural heritage, constitute the life codes of the societies that make them up. On the other hand, as the smallest part of society, man, who had to leave the space that he had created, shaped and kept alive with his own hands in one way or another from ancient times to the present, followed the traces of the society to which he most belonged, searched for its essence and questioned his "belonging". In this context, while the study seeks to find the spatial identity infrastructure, which includes the life codes of the Anatolian geography, in the social lives of societies, also aims to question the problem of belonging in context of the “forced migration” which is one of the most dramatic events in history that displaces societies in the process of nationization and detaches people from their "space”, to be able to read the place through the cultural accumulation and transfer of “exchanged lives”, to find the “lost” in the dimension of culture-space-time. There is no doubt that Kayaköy, which was chosen as the study area for this purpose deserves this attention with its experience of the forced migration in all its reality and nakedness, history, culture, unique architectural style and texture, locality, "sustainability" of the local, testimony of the period in question, abandonment and finally the “accounts” made on it by powers from different segments.