Tomb of Hayreddin Barbarossa

The türbe of Hayrettin Pasha — better known in the West as Barbarossa, chief admiral of Süleyman's navy — stands beside the highway in Beşiktaş on the European shore of the lower Bosphorus; it is Sinan's earliest mausoleum, dated by the inscription over its door to A.H. 948 (1541–2), four to five years before Barbarossa's death ¹.

The structure is octagonal with two rows of windows; the upper row was filled in the 1960s with modern stained glass, and the dome repainted with white arabesques on a rust ground ¹. Three catafalques occupy the centre, and a cluster of handsome marble sarcophagi stands in the little garden ¹. In 1946, on the fourth centennial of Barbarossa's death, a statue by the sculptor Zühtü Müridoğlu was unveiled in the square facing the tomb, bearing on its back six verses by the poet Yahya Kemal imagining Barbarossa's return from Tunis or Algiers ².

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 253–254 (Türbe of Barbarossa).
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