Kılıç Ali Paşa, the admiral of the fleet who died in 1587, founded his complex at Tophane on what was then the shoreline, at the head of the most important landing stage for boats coming up from the harbour of İstanbul to the Beyoğlu side. His tomb lies on the qibla side of the mosque, nearer the sea than the rest, with a burial ground beside it.
It is built of cut stone and octagonal in its outer walls, covered as most tombs are by a dome within a dome. The entrance sits inside a deep niche, and the unusual thing is what that arrangement does inside: two columns placed opposite the doorway brace, together with the solid walls of the entrance niche, the arches that carry the dome — a solution rarely met with in tombs of this kind.
The mosque it stands behind was completed in 1580 and, on the evidence of the registers of Sinan's works, is his. Evliya Çelebi, writing in the first half of the seventeenth century, said there was nothing else like it in the city and compared it to Hagia Sophia. In the burial ground around the tomb and along the side of the mosque are a great many graves, among them headstones brought here from the cemeteries of the Defterdar Ebülfazl mosque on the Fındıklı slopes and the Ağa mosque in Beyoğlu.
The tomb belongs to a complex, and most of that complex is still standing around it. It was made up of a mosque inside an outer courtyard wall, a large medrese beside it and a single bath house. The entry warns that the sebil at the street corner of the courtyard wall is probably not part of the founder's work: its three windows are divided by columns with muqarnas capitals, but the cast-iron grilles in them are in a manner at odds with classical Turkish art, and when the road between Dolmabahçe and Tophane was laid out afresh under Abdülaziz some monuments in its path were demolished, some cut back and some lifted and rebuilt elsewhere, which is the likeliest reason for a sebil standing against this wall. Elsewhere the founder is recorded as having had a double bath on the shore of the Golden Horn near the Fener landing, of which nothing survives, and a small mosque at Beşiktaş.
It is worth stepping into the mosque, because the comparison with Hagia Sophia is not simply a compliment. The main space is a true rectangle; the mihrab stands in a projecting bay under a half dome, and two further projections sit near the entrance, the right-hand one forming the base of the minaret. Along the qibla axis the space is roofed by two half domes, as at Hagia Sophia and later at the Bayezid and Süleymaniye mosques, and the element that makes the resemblance plainest is the pair of buttresses on either flank. The entry's judgement is that Sinan, in one of the last large works of a long career, did not imitate but reworked the plan and superstructure of a building he had studied closely, and reached something both better resolved and structurally safer. The porch proper is covered by five domes on arches carried on columns, and in front of it stands a second porch under a lead-covered sloping roof on marble columns, whose capitals are classical enough to suggest it went up with the building or very soon after. Sixteenth-century İznik tiles face the porch and the interior, and the tiling covers the qibla wall and frames the mihrab. A photograph taken by Robertson around 1855 shows the minaret scaffolded and renewed from the middle of the shaft upward, so at some point and for unknown reasons it had come down; a stone cap with baroque ornament was set on the rebuilt shaft, and the lead-covered pointed cap of the original design has since been put back.
The other buildings of the complex have had harder histories. The medrese was square: seventeen cells under eighteen domes around an arcaded court, the northern one given over to the entrance, with a large domed classroom and prayer room projecting towards the burial ground in the middle. Like the bath it was built in mixed technique, stone laid up with brick courses. A record of 1914-15 shows it out of establishment by then; it was handed over for many years to the child welfare society and turned into a dispensary, which altered it heavily, and although the building was emptied around 1995 the interior was left as those alterations had made it. Its library's books were moved to the Süleymaniye Library in 1918. The bath departs from the usual plan in a way worth noticing: the warm rooms do not lie directly behind the changing hall but at the side, as very small spaces, and the hot room is of the kind used more often in thermal bath architecture, a round central space opening out through arches set in a star pattern. For years it served as a night shelter for people with nowhere else to sleep, which the entry says has given it a particular place in the city's history; it was later brought back into working order. A primary school is recorded for the complex, but a published list shows its site was vacant ground between 1920 and 1927, so nothing is known of where it stood or what it looked like.
The burial ground reads as a register of the quarter's trades. Among the many graves beside the mosque and around the tomb are seamen and, in connection with Tophane, artillerymen, together with the mathematician Hasan Fuad Paşa.
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).
