Twenty domes carried on twelve massive piers roof the Ulu Camii, the Great Mosque of Bursa: a rectangular prayer hall of 55 by 69 metres in the middle of the city, which the provincial governorate calls the largest of all the mosques in Türkiye that bear the name Ulu Cami. Yıldırım Bayezid had it raised in the last years of the fourteenth century — the metropolitan municipality's heritage office gives 1396 to 1400 — and the governorate gives 1400 as the year it was finished. The architect is thought to have been Ali Neccar.
The domes come with a story. After his victory at Niğbolu, Bayezid is said to have resolved to build twenty mosques, and his son-in-law Emir Sultan advised him to build a single mosque with twenty domes instead. Tradition adds that the plot was revealed to Emir Sultan in a dream and confirmed when grass was found sprouting on it the next morning, and that the building was paid for with the spoils of Niğbolu.
Inside, the dome at the centre was left open to the sky and has since been glazed over, and beneath it, within the prayer hall itself, sits a sixteen-sided pool with a fountain of three bowls; the axis of the mihrab and those of all three doors cross at its centre. Legend holds that an old woman's house stood on this spot, that she refused to sell it and was not forced to, and that the plot was left unroofed and outside the prayer area until her death. The present fountain was built by Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz Efendi, who had come to Bursa from Istanbul as a political exile, and in the 1640s Evliya Çelebi wrote of trout swimming in its pool, whose water came from Uludağ.
The governorate counts the minbar as the finest piece of craftsmanship in the building. It is walnut, stained black, and made in the kündekari manner — geometric pieces carved to lock into one another with neither glue nor nails. A line running down its right-hand rail names the maker as Hacı Mehmet bin Abdülaziz el-Dukki of Antep, the same master who made the 1379 minbar of İshak Bey's Ulu Camii in Manisa, and a few raised shapes on its east face are said to represent the sun and the planets. The mihrab, with eight tiers of muqarnas and hourglass-shaped colonnettes at its outer edges, has the name of its maker, Mehmet Usta, on its left side. The muezzins' gallery on eight slender columns dates from 1549, and the round preacher's chair (kürsü) carved from a single piece of marble from 1815.
The walls are a gallery of calligraphy. There are 192 inscriptions in all, by forty-one calligraphers working in thirteen different scripts — 87 painted straight onto the walls and 105 on hanging panels — dated to the second half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Most of the panels carry the calligrapher's signature, and most of the pieces had their losses made good, or were written afresh, by the calligrapher Şefik Bey. The mosque also keeps valuable clocks, candlesticks and copies of the Qur'an. Hung high to the right of the minbar is a black cloth that once covered the door of the Kaaba: after his Egyptian campaign Yavuz Sultan Selim had the Kaaba's covering renewed with a new one sent from Istanbul, brought the old one to Bursa and hung it in the mosque himself. Its verses were stitched in gold thread, but damp let in by faulty restorations has stripped much of the embroidery, and the lettering now shows only under strong light.
The mosque's first imam and preacher was Süleyman Çelebi, and the governorate ties the birth of his Mevlid to an afternoon here in Ramadan 1409. A preacher explaining the Qur'anic verse that makes no distinction among the messengers (al-Baqara 285) was contradicted by a man in the congregation, who held that the Prophet Muhammad stood above the others in virtue; the dispute moved Süleyman Çelebi to write his poem on the Prophet's merits. The Mevlid, in Turkish, runs to roughly a thousand couplets.
The building has been burned, shaken and rebuilt many times. When Timur reached Bursa after defeating Bayezid at Ankara, his army set fire to the north door, and later Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey had wood piled around the mosque and set alight. The earthquake of 1855 brought down eighteen of the twenty domes, sparing only the one beside the west minaret and the one in front of the mihrab; a fire in 1889 consumed the wooden caps of the minarets, which were replaced in masonry. The works of 1959–1961 scraped the plaster from the walls and rebuilt the north door to its original form. A tiled fountain put up at the south-west corner in 1903 was pulled down during those works and rebuilt in 1993–1994 close to its first design.
From outside, the walls are of cut küfeki stone, with windows set in pairs, two below and two above, inside blind arches; the windows change in shape and size from one front to the next, and the walls themselves vary in thickness, from 2.20 metres on the south to 3.10 metres on the west. A minaret rises at each end of the north front, on a marble base with a brick shaft; the western one was built by Bayezid himself. Of the three doors, on the east, west and north, the north portal opening onto the courtyard is the grandest, crowned by a hood of eleven tiers of muqarnas, while the carved walnut leaves of the east door have come down largely intact. The courtyard holds three fountains (şadırvan).
Getting there
The mosque stands in the centre of Bursa, on Atatürk Caddesi. Ulu Camii Caddesi, the street that runs alongside it through the historic bazaar and hans quarter, is one of the busiest passages of the bazaar; the Osmangazi municipality names it among the city's main centres of faith tourism.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Bursa as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 5.4 °C in January to 24.6 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in August (18 mm). Long-term means for 1927-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
