Up on a plateau in the remote highlands of northeast Turkey, 45 km away from the Turkish border city of Kars, lies the crumbling ruins of some forty-odd churches, chapels and mausoleums. This area was once a glorious walled city called Ani belonging to the Armenian Kamsarakan Dynasty, who established base here in the 5th century. As the city grew in size, power and wealth, it became an important trading hub, and by the 11th century, the city boasted more than 100,000 citizens. During its heydays, it was known as “the City of Forty Gates” and sometimes “the City of a Thousand And One Churches.”

Ani’s golden age of wealth, peace and prosperity came to an end with the death of the Armenia ruler King Gagik I, after which the city gave way to a string of invaders starting with the Byzantines, followed by a ruthless massacre by the Turks, the Kurds, the Georgians, and then the Mongols who left the city devastated in 1236. Although Ani continued to exist for another six centuries it was little more than a small town. By the time the Europeans discovered Ani, it lay abandoned for nearly a century with great heaps of stones for former buildings. Ani’s most visible monuments today are the dozens of half standing churches.

The Church of the Redeemer, completed shortly after the year 1035. It had a unique design: 19-sided externally, 8-apsed internally, with a huge central dome set upon a tall drum. The church was largely intact until 1955, when the entire eastern half collapsed during a storm.

The Cathedral of Ani, built in 989.

The Church of the Redeemer.

The walls of Ani.

The walls of Ani.

The Monastery of the Hripsimian Virgins, by the Akhurian River.

The walls of Ani.

The era of plantation mansion construction in the U.S. South ran roughly from the 1770’s until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860. The rich plantation owners (farmers that had more than 50 slaves) grew a variety of crops which were for the most part exported to Europe. The main crop however was cotton. The plantation owners built big houses, many of which fall into the category of mansions.

It must always be remembered much of the wealth acquired by these plantation owners came on the backs of Black slaves.

The Cotton Belt

In colonial Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, the earliest plantation houses tended to follow British-derived folk forms such as the hall and parlor house-type and central-passage house-type.

Grander structures during the later colonial period usually conformed to the neoclassically-influenced Georgian and Palladian styles, although some very early and rare Jacobean structures survive in Virginia. Following the Revolutionary War, Federal and Jeffersonian-type neoclassicism became dominant in formal plantation architecture.

When the cotton boom years began in the 1830s, the United States was entering its second neoclassical phase, with Greek Revival architecture being the dominant style. By this point trained architects were also becoming more common, and several introduced the style to the South. Whereas the earlier Federal and Jeffersonian neoclassicism displayed an almost feminine lightness, academic Greek Revival was very masculine, with a heaviness not seen in the earlier styles.

Greek Revival would remain a favorite architectural style in the agrarian South until well after the Civil War, but other styles had appeared in the nation about the same time as Greek Revival or soon afterward. These were primarily the Italianate and Gothic Revival. They were slower to be adopted in whole for domestic plantation architecture, but they can be seen in a fusion of stylistic influences. Houses that were basically Greek Revival in character sprouted Italianate towers, bracketed eaves, or adopted the asymmetrical massing characteristic of that style.

Millford Plantation, South Carolina

Destrehan, Louisiana

Longwood, in Natchez, Mississippi

Gaineswood, in Demopolis, Alabama

Bowie, Maryland