Mihrimah Edirnekapı Mosque

Mihrimah Edirnekapı Mosqueについて

This is the mosque Sinan built for a patron who could afford to commission him twice. Mihrimah Sultan, daughter of Suleiman the Magnificent and Hürrem Sultan, ordered two mosques from the chief imperial architect; this one, on the Sixth Hill beside the Edirnekapı gate, is the later and by far the more radical. Building commenced around 1563 and was finished by 1570. No foundation inscription survives, which is why the dates are given as a span rather than a day.

The site carries the argument. Edirnekapı stands near the highest ground inside the Theodosian land walls, and Sinan placed the building where anyone approaching Constantinople along the road from Edirne would meet it first. It is a mosque conceived as the city's reply to its own horizon.

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中には何が入っているのか

One room, and the room is the whole case. Sinan set a dome 20 metres in diameter and 37 metres high on a cube, then proceeded to dissolve the cube: each of the four sides carries a symmetrical tympanum pierced with rows of windows, so the walls read as glazed screens braced by corner piers rather than as masonry holding something up. The interior is described as one of the lightest of any of Sinan's works, and on a clear morning that is not a figure of speech — the floor is patterned with the shapes of its own windows.

Entry is through an imposing porch of seven domed bays on marble and granite columns. Outside stand the remaining pieces of the külliye Mihrimah endowed: a medrese, a türbe, an arasta whose shop rents paid for the upkeep, and a double hamam that is still in operation. A single minaret, tall and unusually slender, rises at one corner.

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見学時間の目安

Thirty-five minutes, and most of them should be spent standing still. This is not a building anyone tours: there is one prayer hall and no route through it. Take your shoes off, walk to roughly the centre, and look up until the pattern of windows stops reading as decoration and starts reading as structure. That is the visit, and it does not shorten well.

The remainder covers the courtyard, the tombs in the hazire outside, and a circuit of the exterior to see how the mass sits on the fall of the ground. Add ten minutes for the Theodosian walls at the gate below — a different subject entirely, but the natural extension of this one and only a short walk downhill.

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季節と混雑状況

Come on a clear day, in the morning. The whole reason to travel out to Edirnekapı is the light through those tympana, and under a flat winter overcast it simply does not occur — the interior goes grey and the building becomes an ordinary large mosque a long way from anywhere else worth seeing. Sun is not a bonus here, it is the exhibit.

This is a working mosque under the Diyanet with its own congregation, not a monument with a managed visitor flow. The five daily prayers set the real timetable, and the half hour before each one and the twenty minutes after belong to worshippers rather than to visitors. Friday around midday is both the busiest moment and the least appropriate one to arrive with a camera.

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チケット

There is no ticket. Mihrimah Sultan Mosque at Edirnekapı is a working place of worship, free to enter, and no museum card or pass is involved anywhere in the transaction. Nobody will sell you anything at the door and there is no bag check to queue for.

What the building asks for instead is the ordinary courtesy every Istanbul mosque asks: shoes off and either carried or left on the racks, shoulders and knees covered, a headscarf for women, phones silenced, no crossing in front of somebody at prayer, and no photographs of people praying. Loan scarves turn up at the door of the tourist mosques as a matter of routine; here they are not guaranteed, so bring your own rather than counting on the rack.

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行き方

The T4 tram, running the 15.3 kilometres between Topkapı and Mescid-i Selam, has an underground station at Edirnekapı — the line's original southern terminus before the 2009 extension. That is the straightforward approach, and the dome is your landmark the moment you come up the steps.

None of this is the Sultanahmet tram, which catches people out. Edirnekapı sits several kilometres inland from the old-city tourist strip, out where the land walls run, and the T1 does not reach it; the metrobus interchanges on this line are at Topkapı and Şehitlik, not at the mosque's own stop. Walking up from the Golden Horn at Ayvansaray takes you through Balat and up a serious hill. Following the walls north from Topkapı Gate is flatter and better company. Whichever route you take, the last stretch climbs, because the elevation is the entire point of the site.

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気をつけるべきこと

No visitor timetable is published. As a working mosque under the Diyanet it opens around the prayer times rather than on museum hours, and no canonical source states an opening and closing time, so plan to arrive between prayers in daylight and accept that you may wait outside for a few minutes.

Expect scaffolding somewhere. The mosque itself reopened for worship on 15 October 2010 after restoration following the 1999 earthquakes, but work on the courtyard, the medrese and the other complex buildings began on 19 August 2011 and parts of the külliye have been under cover since. The site has a long record of shaking: the minaret stairs went in 1719, the minaret and dome came down in 1766, and in 1894 the minaret fell through the roof. One research trap is worth knowing — articles about a restoration running twenty-six months and still unfinished concern the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque in the city of Edirne, not this one.

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写真

Interiors first. Stand near the qibla wall and shoot up and across so that the dome and one complete tympanum sit in the same frame; that is the only composition which explains what Sinan actually did here, and a straight-up shot of the dome could be any dome in the city. Mid-morning sun through the eastern windows throws hard geometric shapes onto the carpet, and those shapes are the photograph. By afternoon the effect has crossed the hall and softened. No flash, and nothing pointed at people at prayer.

Outside, the silhouette against sky is what the building was designed to produce, so walk downhill towards the walls and shoot back up: from below, the cube-and-dome mass reads clearly and the slender minaret has room to breathe. Late afternoon puts the sun behind the mosque from the Golden Horn side, which yields a silhouette rather than a portrait. For detail in the stone, come in the morning and stand on the Edirnekapı side.

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