Abstract:

City/urban architecture and design are changing from traditional to modern times. The eye-centered world, which started with the idea of perspectivism based on the Renaissance and accelerated with the invention of the camera, brought along important changes in the urban setting. With the development of means of transportation and the spread of photography, there have been changes in the understanding of travel, and human mobility has increased on a global scale. As one of the requirements of the institutionalization of tourism and its industrialization over time, new tourist-specific experience and practice areas have emerged. The “tourist gaze” conceptualized by John Urry, as one of the most prominent indicators of touristic travel, is distinguished from other gazes due to its character based on pleasure and consumption. The modern and postmodern urban setting, which has devoted itself to visually rearranging every place, area, and space that can be the subject of a human’s gaze, has made holy places and religious buildings such as mosques, madrasahs, social complexes, tombs, cupolas the subject of the tourist’s gaze. This study deals with the relationship between socio-religious buildings and tourist gaze with a descriptive methodical approach. It focuses on the reflections of the tourist gaze on religious buildings, which are pushed to the periphery of life day by day, in the grip of the reproduction of space and its conspicuous consumption. As a result, the study points out that restoration, landscape, and recreation works carried out by taking the tourist gaze into the center face religious buildings away from their histories and identities, and more importantly, consuming their potential to become a living space and a place of memory for new generations.

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