Eyüp Sultan Mosque

The shrine of Eyüp on the upper reaches of the Golden Horn is the holiest Muslim site in Istanbul — after Mecca and Medina, in the source author's words, the third most sacred place of pilgrimage in the Islamic world ¹. Five years after the Conquest Fatih built a külliye around the discovered grave, comprising the türbe, a mosque, medrese, han, hamam, imaret and market ².

Here the Ottoman sultans were girded with the sword of their ancestor Osman Gazi on accession — a ceremony equivalent to coronation first performed for Beyazit II in 1481 ². By the end of the eighteenth century the mosque had fallen into ruins, perhaps in the 1766 earthquake; in 1798 Selim III had the remains torn down and the present mosque, finished in 1800, erected — only the minarets, a gift of Ahmet III, survive from the older building ².

The approach passes through an irregular outer courtyard with two undulating baroque gateways, aged plane trees and pampered pigeons, then an inner courtyard ringed on three sides by an unusually tall colonnade ³. The mosque is an octagon inscribed in a rectangle, with baroque decoration and pale honey-coloured stone ⁴. A wall opposite, sheathed in tile panels of many periods, gives onto the vestibule of Eyüp's octagonal türbe, itself clad in the best İznik tiles and visible through an ornate grille ⁴. Of the hamam, the soğukluk and hararet survive in use; a fine panel of 24 İznik tiles of c.1570 from this hamam is in the Victoria and Albert Museum ⁴. Around the mosque lies a veritable suburb of the dead with grandee türbes and a vast hillside graveyard crowned by the café made famous by Pierre Loti ⁵.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 125–128 (Tomb and Shrine of Eyüp).
• Prior short prose resting on Wikidata alone replaced in this batch; the tomb-discovery story is Evliya Çelebi's as told by Freely, summarised rather than repeated.
• The card's 1458 date comes from Wikidata; Freely dates the külliye to 'five years after the Conquest'.