Throughout its history, Birgi has endured disasters such as floods, earthquakes, fires, and plague outbreaks, causing significant damage to its civilian architecture. When Evliya Çelebi visited Birgi in 1671, he described the old settlement north of the Grand Mosque as follows: “… The houses are tiled, numbering two thousand six hundred. Birgi cannot be seen from the vineyards and gardens of Tire. There are forty-seven flour mills famous for their figs, pomegranates, grapes, and silk thread…”. He also mentioned that there were eighteen neighborhoods, twenty-four mihrabs, two hundred shops, two hans, and four hundred tiled stone houses in the inner fortress and lower town. In Birgi, like in other mountain villages in Ödemiş, houses are built on slopes and rise step by step, with narrow streets using a grid system for transportation, sheltered from wind and heat. Each house in Birgi’s traditional civilian architecture has a garden/courtyard, and the facades are adorned with symbols such as the tree of life, eye, pomegranate, sun, and ear of wheat, which have their origins in legends, mythologies, and beliefs, generally made of tiles and stones. Stone garden walls sometimes continue in the form of house facades, creating street integrity. From two-roomed, ground+1-floor examples with open porches to later examples where the porch is enclosed, Birgi houses with bay windows exhibit the characteristics of traditional Turkish house architecture, integrating with local features and harmonizing with the natural structure of the region. Chimneys, narrowing from the ground to the roof, protrude from the facade, with different forms of caps at the top. While living spaces are located on the first floors of the houses, storage rooms, cellars, stables, and haylofts are located on the ground floors, and the kitchen, oven, fountain, and toilet are located in the house’s garden. Some houses have wells in the garden, while others have a wide gate opening to the courtyard/garden for the entrance of animals and horse carts. The ground floors of these modest houses are built with rubble stone technique, while the upper floors are generally constructed with the bağdadi system (filling between wooden laths). In the same region, there are also magnificent examples of civilian architecture such as the Çakır Ağa, Sandıkoğlu, Kerim Ağa, and Paşazade Mansions. The Çakır Ağa Mansion consists of a ground+2 floors structure.
