Guide
The Akça — or Ağca — Mescit is one of the oldest buildings in Adana and is known as the oldest Turkish building in the city. It stands in the Ulu Cami quarter, sixty metres from the great mosque. It was built in the time of Şahabeddin Bey of the Ramazanoğulları by Ağcabey, one of the Turkmen beys, and takes its name from him.
How old it is rests on a reading. Besides written inscriptions giving a date, Turkish buildings were sometimes dated through symbols, by the reckoning known as ebced, and that is what appears here. Above the main door, where the present inscription is, there were once two bird figures in relief whose traces remain, and those birds make a date: a bird corresponds to 406, and two of them give 812 of the Hijra, which the portal renders as 1489. If that reading is accepted, the building predates the great mosque, first built in 1513 — which is why it matters. The two birds are no longer there, but traces of a facing pair can be seen on the right edge of the border around the door. The inscription written on the tympanum above the main door reads 1184 of the Hijra, 1770, and shows that a benefactor named Hacı Hasan Ağa had the building thoroughly repaired in that year.
It is a small single-space mosque of about ten metres by ten, under one dome. The walls are large cut-stone blocks on a low platform, square in plan, and the high-drummed dome makes it look from outside like a tomb. The doorway is decorated with relief in plant patterns and the mihrab is stone and striking.
The building was used as a museum store in the 1930s. It was badly damaged in 1964 and again in the earthquake of 1998, and repaired by the Directorate General of Foundations in 2004.
