Abstract

ABSTRACT

Due to the its location, geographical feature sand history of settlements date back to the old times, our country has a large variety and wealthy potential in terms of not only its natural beatuies but also the values of past society and civilizations. Turkey, is just like "open air museum" with its cultural heritage in visible form, is open to great developments in terms of cultural heritage researches.

Today, a large number of discipline conduct a research with regard to the cultur and cultural heritage and approach this subject from various aspects. Among them, history and geography are among the first diciplines come to mind and as in our country it seems that history concentrate on past; geography concentrate on modern day's cultural subjects. Therefore, historical geography, remain in between geography that does spatial research without historical depth hand history discipline which deals with past with out looking at the subject in terms of spatial, has wider perspective in this context.

Since all human activities take place on space, culture takes an important place in geography which is space-based discipline. Cultural heritage has a similar position in historical geography because of historical geography and culture refer directly to the past. Moreover, since all of the cultural heritage is located on space, historical geography, which focus on researching of pastspace, also draw attention in cultural heritage studies. From this point, doing necessary arrangement in educational and science life, enough researcher and expert should be educated in historical geography and rich cultural heritage of our country should take into service to the scientific community, cultural tourism and other users.

Keywords: Historical geography, cultural heritage, space, culture, cultural tourism.