The Great Mosque of Erzurum stands in the Yakutiye district and is both the oldest and the largest mosque in the city. It went up in 1179, under Melik Nasirüddin Muhammed Bey of the Saltukids, and carries a second name in local use: Atabeg, or Atabey, Mosque.
That second name records a political allegiance. The Saltukids were the first Turkish principality established in Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert, and they made Erzurum their capital; the mosque took the name Atabeg out of deference to Atabeg Kızıl Arslan, to whom the ruler of the day was subject. Visiting the building is therefore also visiting the first years of Turkish rule in this part of the country.
The plan follows Seljuk practice, where the courtyard that a hotter climate would leave open is pulled inside and roofed. The building covers roughly 52.5 by 41 metres, some 2,150 square metres in all, with about 2,000 of that as prayer space. There are five doors — two on the east side, three on the north — and no two of them are alike; beside the first eastern door stand two small mihrabs and the inscription recording a repair carried out in 1860.
Three domes cover the hall. The one over the mihrab wall rests on pointed arches and large pendentives, and it is the detail worth looking up for: it is a wooden lattice of the type known as a swallow roof, still the original from the year the mosque was built. Its shape is not only decorative — it gathers the damp of the prayer hall and draws it out of the building. The mosque was laid out for six thousand worshippers, and about four and a half thousand pray in it comfortably today.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Erzurum as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -9.1 °C in January to 19.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in July and August; rainfall is heaviest in May (73 mm) and lightest in August (18 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
