Yesil Mosque, Bursa

The Green Mosque (Yeşil Cami) in Bursa was commissioned in 1412 by Çelebi Mehmet, who the following year became sole ruler of the Ottoman Empire as Mehmet I; its architect was Hacı Ivaz Pasha ¹.

The mosque was unfinished when Mehmet died in 1421, and decorative work continued for four more years; arch springs visible on the façade show the design called for a five-bayed porch that was never built. The two minarets date from the nineteenth century — the original apparently had one — and the building is entirely of hewn stone and marble ¹. Its plan is a variant of the cross-axial eyvan type: the entry opens into a lobby flanked by halls, with stairs rising to the royal loge, then a domed square central hall with an octagonal şadırvan pool, side eyvans raised one step and the prayer-hall eyvan raised four; the four adjoining rooms originally served as hospice cells for itinerant dervishes ². The mosque is famed for its polychrome cuerda seca tiles, above all the deep blue and the green that gave it its name; the mihrab rises fifteen metres sheathed in tile, and inscriptions in the royal loge name the tile-maker Mehmet el-Mecnun and the decorator Nakkas Ali ibn Ilyas Ali ³.

• Source read: John Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (WIT Press, 2011), harvest scan extra-architecture, pp. 60–63 (Yeşil Cami section).
• The record previously cited only Goodwin 1971; the read source (Freely) was added to the YAML.