Color Differentiation of Wall Stones: Historic Karatay College Building

Abstract

People in Anatolia have lived mainly in residential houses constructed by concrete and bricks. There are also historic houses in small towns and villages which were built by using building stones, bricks, adobe and wood in combination. However, in the case of public buildings, dimension stones had been used in Anatolia for the main construction material since early times in history. Similarly, Karatay College, (Karatay Madrasah, “Karatay Medresesi”) buildings in Konya had been built by using stones, wood and dimension stones in combination in 1251 for educational purposes. It is logical to think that this building have been repaired several times in history. Some of the early historic photographs (dated 1890) of Konya which were taken for general scenery purposes, covered also Karatay College building. These photos present the college’s main entrance door and its frontier wall. Dimension stones in this wall were also identified through the earlier photographs and their current digitized surface colors have been defined one by one. Color differentiation among them, together with similar stone types’ surface colors observed around Konya city were determined to evaluate weathering influences on this frontier wall stones. Defined surface color changes for analyzed frontier wall stones demonstrated rock weathering due to climate, environments and human influences which should be set to minimum level to protect Karatay college building.