Post-Byzantine Architectural Memory in Ottoman Bithynia: Continuity and Transformation Between Byzantine Churches and Nineteenth-Century Greek Orthodox Churches in Bursa

This article examines Byzantine-period churches and nineteenth-century Greek Orthodox churches in Bursa and its surroundings as an interrelated corpus of Christian sacred architecture in Ottoman Bithynia. Rather than treating the two groups as separate historical categories, it asks how Byzantine spatial and liturgical memory was selectively retained, transformed and made visible under late Ottoman conditions. Drawing on architectural documentation, conservation records, field observations and comparative regional literature, the study analyses plan typology, apse and bema organization, narthex and gallery arrangements, structural systems, material use, façade articulation, ornamentation and public visibility. The comparison shows that nineteenth-century churches did not preserve Byzantine forms unchanged. While domed masonry systems, pastophoria and complex centralized plans were reduced or reconfigured, key liturgical principles, including east-west orientation, apsidal focus and the separation of the sacred core, remained persistent. At the same time, timber roofs, composite masonry, galleries, legible façades and occasional bell towers reflected local building practice, legal reform and communal representation. Bursa thus emerges as a regional case in which post-Byzantine architectural memory was neither passively inherited nor simply lost, but actively reworked within the material, social and spatial conditions of the Ottoman province and within wider debates on Anatolian Christian heritage studies.