This is the tomb that gave the district its name, and the municipality calls it the first building the Ottomans raised in the city: Mehmed II had it built in 1454-55, immediately after the conquest. It stands on the north side of the Eyüp Sultan Mosque, just in front of the inner courtyard.
The man buried here is Halid bin Zeyd, Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, from Medina and head of one of the leading branches of the Khazraj. He met the Prophet in Mecca two years before the migration and became a Muslim. When the Prophet reached Medina in 622 every household wanted to host him; he let his camel choose, and it knelt in front of Halid bin Zeyd's house, where he stayed for seven months until the mosque was finished.
That episode is why the tomb matters to visitors: the man who hosted the Prophet is buried at the top of the Golden Horn, and the complex around him — mosque, courtyards, cemetery — grew from this single building.
He reached this city with an army rather than as a pilgrim, and that is how he came to be buried at the head of the Golden Horn. From the day he became a Muslim he did not leave the Prophet's side and carried his standard in all his campaigns. In 668-69 a Muslim force under the command of Süfyan bin Avf came up against Constantinople; the city was put under siege, and while the siege was still going on both Süfyan bin Avf and Halid bin Zeyd died. He was old by then and worn down by long journeys, and had taken to his bed — the district's account gives dysentery in one version and asthma in another. He was buried where the tomb stands today.
The finding of that grave, nearly eight centuries later, is the story the site is built on, and the account gives it in two versions. Mehmed II had pitched his tent across from Topkapı during the siege and asked Akşemseddin, the sheikh who had come with the army, to locate it. In the version taken from Evliya Çelebi, the sheikh spread his prayer rug, prayed two cycles, and then stayed bowed so long that onlookers said he was hiding his failure behind sleep; when he lifted his head he told the sultan that the rug had been laid, by God's design, directly over the grave. Three of his followers dug there with the sultan, and at a depth of about three cubits a square slab of green porphyry came up, inscribed in Kufic with the words naming the grave of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari. In the second version the sheikh said he had seen a light descend on that quarter every night, and marked the spot with a plane tree at the head and another at the foot; Mehmed, to test him, had the two trees lifted and replanted on the terraced ground in the inner courtyard and his own ring buried at the grave, whereupon the sheikh walked past the trees straight to the grave and drove his staff into the middle of it. The raised, walled platform carrying two plane trees in the inner courtyard belongs to this story in the account, and was fenced and lifted so that it would not be trodden underfoot.
The building itself is octagonal under a single dome, and its door was made of wood in Mehmed II's own time. Between the inner courtyard and the tomb entrance is the Hacet Penceresi, the window of need, whose bronze grille was made for Ahmed I and is the original; an inscription runs above its courtyard face, and on the inner side is written the tradition about leaving the camel to itself, which returns the visitor to the story of the house in Medina. To the left of the entrance a corridor runs to a point where it opens out, with a Qur'an-reading room on either side, and its two side walls are faced with rare tiles in various colours and patterns. The account rates the calligraphy here among the finest anywhere, and singles out a panel whose verse was composed by a sultan Selim and written by Yesarizade Mustafa İzzet Efendi.
For centuries this was where a new sultan received his sword, which explains why the buildings around the grave are as grand as they are. Collective Friday prayers were held on the site of the present Eyüp Sultan Mosque from the early days of the siege until the conquest, and the holy standard was kept in the tomb until 1730, when the Patrona rising sent rebels after it and it was moved at once to Topkapı Palace; two of its cases remain here. The girding came at no fixed interval after accession — the fourteenth day for Mehmed Reşad, the eighth for Abdülhamid II, the eleventh for Mecid, the twenty-first for Ahmed II — and the man who performed it varied: the chief jurist girded Ahmed I in 1603 and Mehmed IV, while in 1730 the head of the Prophet's descendants girded Mahmud I with the sword attributed to the Prophet. Selim III came by land through Edirnekapı on the seventh day of his reign and went home by sea; Mahmud II came by land, stopped at his ancestor Mehmed II's tomb, prayed in the royal loge of the mosque, then put on the Prophet's sword at his right side and his forefather Osman's at his left, and returned by boat. The last of these processions, in April 1909, brought Mehmed Reşad up the Golden Horn on the steamer Söğütlü, with twenty-one-gun salutes from the ironclads off Dolmabahçe and again from the warships at the arsenal.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; 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 July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
