AŞAĞI ALIÇLI VILLAGE CHURCH

X: 41.522622 Y: 38.208433 Z: 675.69

The church is located within the borders of Aşağı Alıçlı village of Kozluk district of Batman province. The village of Aşağı Alıçlı is located 5.10 km northeast of the center of Kozluk.

With its exterior impression, it reflects the traditional Kozluk housing texture exactly. It was determined that the building, which shows a two-storey house establishment, was built on a pre-existing church. Existing sources were scanned and no description of the church was found. For this reason, the site plan of the building was read in the light of the data obtained during the field study. When viewed from the outside, the building shows the characteristics of a traditional two-storey residence. It has been seen that the lower floor of the two-storey building was designed as a barn and material warehouse, and the upper floor was designed as a house.

On the masonry covered with smooth cut stone, cruciform depictions are intensely depicted. This iconographic decoration reflecting the Armenian architecture made us think that this building belongs to the Late Period (1890-1900) Armenian architecture. Similarly, masonry and cross-like depictions were found in the Bapşin Church in Bitlis. Another architectural detail we can come across on the ground floor interior is the arch structures opened under the walls. We have questioned that this church, which is in ruins today, may have been a chapel built on the lower floor of the house, and thus a smaller place of worship was intended to be created. However, the existing lines of the vault passages that we encountered on the second floor made us think that this building was a larger church in its original form, but that a part of it was later demolished and a house was built on it. Moreover, the fact that the exterior wall in the southwest direction continues without a wall extension towards the south and the vault transitions on the second floor in the north direction suggest that this church occupies a larger area and was a two-storey building in its first construction.