avlu: courtyard of a mosque
cami: mosque; mescit, from which the European word mosque is derived, means a small mosque
dershane: the lecture hall of a medrese
dar-ül hadis: school for learning sacred tradition
dar-ül kura: school for learning the Kuran
dar-üş şifa: hospital
hamam: Turkish bath
hücre: a cell of a medrese where a student lives
hünkâr mahfili: raised and screened box or loge for the sultan and his suite
imaret: public kitchen
kervansaray or han: inn or hostel for merchants and travellers
külliye: building complex forming a pious foundation (vakıf) and often including mosque, türbe, medrese and other buildings
kürsü: preaching chair used on ordinary occasions
kütüphane: library
medrese: a school or college sometimes forming the court yard of a mosque
mektep or sibyan mektebi: primary school
mihrab: niche indicating the direction of Mecca (kıble) towards which all mosques are oriented; from Istanbul this is very nearly south-east
mimber: tall pulpit to right of mihrab used at the main Friday prayer
müezzin mahfili: raised platform for chanters
şadırvan: fountain for ritual ablutions
son cemaat yen: porch of a mosque (lit. “place of last assembly”)
tabhane: hospice for travelling drevishes
tekke: convent for dervishes
türbe: tomb or mausoleum, often in a mosque garden
Note: the forms camii, medresesi, türbesi and similar forms for other words are used when a noun is modified by a preceding noun; thus Sultan Ahmet Camii, but Yeni Cami, New Mosque.
The mosques of Istanbul fall into a small number of fairly distinctive types of increasing complexity. The simplest of all, used at all periods for the less costly buildings, is simply an oblong room covered by a tiled pitched roof; often there was an interior wooden dome, but most of these domes have perished in the frequent fires and been replaced by flat ceilings. Second comes the square room covered by a masonry dome resting directly on the walls. This was generally small and simple but could sometimes take on monumental proportions, as at Yavuz Selim Camii, and occasionally, as there, had side rooms used as hostels for travelling dervishes. At a later period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a more elaborate form of this type was adopted for the baroque mosques, usually with a small projecting apse for the mihrab.
The next two types both date from an earlier period and are rare in Istanbul. Third is the two-domed type, essentially a duplication of the second, forming a long room divided by an open arch, each unit being covered by a dome. It is derived from a style common in the Bursa period of Ottoman architecture and hence often known as the “Bursa type” (see the plan of Mahmut Paşa Camii). A modification occurs when the second unit has only a semidome. Mosques of this type always have side chambers. A fourth type, of which only two examples occur in Istanbul, also derives from the earlier Selçuk and Ottoman periods; a rectangular room covered by a multiplicity of domes of equal size supported on pillars; this is often called the great mosque or Ulu Cami type.
The mosques of the classical period – what most people think of as the “typical” Ottoman mosques – are rather more elaborate. They derive from a fusion of a native Turkish tradition with certain elements of the plan of Haghia Sophia. The great imperial mosques have a vast central dome supported on east and west by semidomes of equal diameter. This strongly resembles the plan of Haghia Sophia, but there are significant differences, dictated partly by the native tradition, partly by the requirements of Islamic ritual. In spite of its domes Haghia Sophia is essentially a basilica, clearly divided into a nave and side aisles by a curtain of columns both on ground floor and gallery level. The mosques suppress this division by getting rid of as many of the columns as possible, thus making the interior almost open and visible from all parts. Moreover the galleries, at Haghia Sophia as wide as the aisles, are here reduced to narrow balconies against the side walls. This is the plan of Beyazit Camii and the Süleymaniye. Sometimes this centralization and opening-up is carried even farther by adding two extra semidomes to north and south, as at the Şehzade, Sultan Ahmet and Yeni Cami. A further innovation of the mosques as compared with Haghia Sophia is the provision of a monumental exterior in attractive grey stone with a cascade of descending domes and semidomes balanced by the upward thrust of the two, four or six minarets.
Another type of classical mosque is also derived from a combination of a native with a Byzantine tradition. This consists of a polygon inscribed in a square or rectangular area covered by a dome. Its prototypes are the early Üç Şerefeli Mosque at Edirne and SS. Sergius and Bacchus here; the former has an inscribed hexagon, the latter an octagon. In the classical mosques of this type (both hexagon and octagon being common) there are again no central columns or wide galleries, the dome supports being pushed back as near as possible to the walls, thus giving a wholly centralized effect. Though this was chiefly used by Sinan and other architects for mosques of grand vezirs and high officials, the most magnificent example of this type is the great mosque of Selim II at Edirne, Sinan’s masterpiece and the largest and most beautiful of all the classical mosques.
Almost all mosques of whatever type are preceded by a porch of three or five domed bays and generally also by a monumental courtyard with a domed arcade. If there is only one minaret – as in all but imperial mosques – it is practically always on the right-hand side of the entrance.
All imperial mosques and most of the grander ones of vezirs and great lords form the centre of a külliye, or complex of buildings, forming one vakıf, or pious foundation, often endowed with great wealth. The founder generally built his türbe, or mausoleum, in the garden or graveyard behind the mosque; these are simple buildings, square or polygonal, covered by a dome and with a small entrance porch, sometimes beautifully decorated inside with tiles. Of the utilitarian buildings, almost always built round four sides of a central arcaded and domed courtyard, the commonest is the medrese, or college. The students’ cells, each with its dome and fireplace, opened off the courtyard with a fountain in the middle, and in the centre of one side is the large domed dershane, or lecture hall. Sometimes the medrese formed three sides of a mosque courtyard, and very occasionally they take unusual shapes like the octagonal one of Rüstem Paşa. These colleges were of different levels, some being mere secondary schools, others of a higher status, and still others for specialized studies such as law, medicine and the hadis, or traditions, of the Prophet.
Primary schools too (sibyan mektebi) were generally included in a külliye, a small building with a single domed classroom often built over a gateway and sometimes including an apartment for the teacher. Tekkes, or convents for dervishes, do not usually differ much in structure from medreses, but the dershane room, which may be in the centre of the courtyard, is used in tekkes for dervish rituals.
The larger imperial foundations included a public kitchen and a hospital. Like medreses these were built round a central courtyard, and the hospitals (dar-üş şifa or timarhane) are almost indistinguishable from them, also having cells for the patients and a large central room like a dershane used as a clinic and examining office. The public kitchens (imaret) instead of cells have vast domed kitchens with very characteristic chimneys, and also large refectories. They provided food for the students and teachers of the medrese, the clergy of the mosque, and the staff and patients of the hospital, as well as for the poor of the neighbourhood. One or two of them still perform the latter service. All these institutions were entirely free of charge and in the great period very efficiently managed.
Fountains are ubiquitous. They are of three kinds: the şadırvan is a large fountain in the middle of a mosque courtyard used for ritual ablutions; the sebil, often at the corner of the outer wall of a mosque precinct, is a monumental domed building with three or more grilled openings in the façade through which cups of water were handed by an attendant to those who asked; the çeşme is also sometimes monumental, often in the middle of a public square, but more frequently it is a simple carved marble slab with a spigot in the centre and a basin below: up until recent years scores of these were still in use to provide much of the population of the city with all the water they received.
Of the secular buildings the most important are the inn or hostel, the Turkish bath and the library. The hostel was usually called han if in a city, kervansaray if on the great trade routes; while tabhane was a hostel originally designed for travelling dervishes. Like so many other buildings it was built round one or more courtyards but was in two or three storeys, the lower one being used for animals and the storage of merchandise (since most travellers were merchants journeying in caravans), the upper ones as guest rooms (see the plan of Valide Hanı). The bath or hamam, a rather elaborate building, is fully described, including a plan, in connection with the Cağaloğlu Hamamı. The library (kütüphane) was often a simple domed room with bookcases in the centre; like the mektep it was sometimes built above the monumental gateway of a mosque enclosure, but it was sometimes independent and more elaborate (see the description of the Atif Efendi library).
Except for Topkapı Sarayı and the unique palace of Ibrahim Paşa, all other palaces until the nineteenth century, however grand, were built almost entirely of wood and have long since perished in the many fires that have ravaged the city. For the seaside mansions (yalı) along the Bosphorus, a few of which still survive, see the description of the Kıbrıslı Yalı.
In Turkish architecture there are no “orders” as these are understood in the West, and how this did infuriate the classically minded travellers in the old days: it was chiefly on this ground that as late as the eighteenth century they kept making such remarks as “the Turks know nothing of architecture,” even though they often greatly admired the building they were describing! Nevertheless in the great period there were two recognized types of capital: the stalactite and the lozenge. The stalactite is an elaborate geometrical structure chiefly of triangles and hexagons built up so that it resembles a stalactite formation or a honeycomb. It is directly derived from Selçuk architecture and is used not only for capitals but often for portal canopies, cornices, and even pendentives and squinches. The lozenge capital, apparently introduced by Sinan or anyhow not much used before his time, is a simple structure of juxtaposed lozenges. Neither capital is very satisfactory compared with the Doric, Ionic or Corinthian, because both, especially the lozenge, give a too-smooth, weak transition from the cylinder of the column to the square of the impost. In the baroque period bad imitations of western types of capitals came into vogue, almost always hopelessly weak. And until the baroque period all Turkish arches had been not round like Roman ones but pointed like the Gothic, and sometimes of the ogive or “broken” type that is often so effectively used by Sinan. It should also be noted that the Turkish dome resembles the hemispherical Roman, Byzantine and Syrian type, not the more common western ovoid type invented by Brunelleschi, which is structurally double: even when Turkish domes are double, as in some türbes, each dome is structurally independent of the other.
Of decoration applied to architecture, far and away the most brilliant and striking is the Turkish tiles. It was not until fairly recent years that the full importance and uniqueness of the Turkish wares were recognized: they used often to be called Rhodian ware or else lumped together with Persian pottery. Even though the potters were sometimes Persian – as well as Greek, Armenian and Turkish – the tiles were altogether different from Persian ware. They were manufactured chiefly at Iznik but also sometimes at Kütahya and Istanbul. In Istanbul chiefly three periods of Turkish ceramics are represented. In the early period from the Conquest to the mid-sixteenth century we find extremely plain tiles without design, deep blue or a lighter green or turquoise, usually hexagonal and sometimes overlaid with an unfired pattern in gold. More interesting are the tiles in the cuerda seca technique: instead of a painted design covered by a transparent glaze, in these tiles the glazes themselves were coloured and the colours were prevented from running into each other by a hair-like dividing line of permanganate of potash outlining the design (hence the name cuerda seca, dry cord); if visible at all this line is deepest purple or black. The predominating colours of these tiles are apple-green and bright yellow with subordinate blues and mauves. They are very beautiful and very rare in Istanbul: see the description of the Şehzade’s türbe and of the porch of Çinili Köşk where the most extensive examples occur.
About 1550 this lovely technique gave place to the no less beautiful and more famous Iznik style, where the design is painted on the clay and covered with an absolutely transparent glaze. Here the predominant colours are on the purest, most unblemished white ground, deep blue, light blue, shades of green, and above all the matchless tomato red. This was made with a clay known as Armenian bole, found near Erzurum in eastern Anatolia. It has to be laid on very thick so that it protrudes from the surface of the tile like sealing-wax. The technique of using it successfully is extremety tricky and was only completely mastered towards 1570 and lost again about 1620, so that the absolutely perfect tiles of this type are confined to this half century. In tiles before and after this date the bole tends to be a bit muddy and brownish and lacking in clear outline. But at their best the Turkish tiles between about 1550 and 1650 are quite incomparable, and unique.
After this the tiles, like most other things in the Empire, began to decline. A short revival was made about 1720 when the last of the Iznik potters were settled at Tekfur Saray in Istanbul, but this hardly outlasted the first generation. Thereafter inferior European tiles or even more inferior imitations of them became the vogue. There has been a considerable and praiseworthy revival of the old style in our own day, so that really good modern tiles (now made at Kütahya and Iznik) are sometimes hard to distinguish, at first glance, from the great ones.