Of all the tombs in İstanbul this is the one to see for its tiles. It stands in front of the mihrab of the Mahmud Paşa mosque in the quarter of that name near Eminönü, built in 1473 for the grand vizier of Mehmed II whose complex this is. An unremarkable door carries a three-line building inscription and, beside it, a repair inscription of 1730.
The plan is an octagon under a drumless dome. Each of the eight faces is set within a frame rising to the eaves cornice, and inside that a second moulded frame holds two windows, one above the other — the lower rectangular with a pointed tympanum and its own moulding, the upper pointed-arched. Up to the level of the top of the lower windows the walls are plain küfeki stone; above that they are inlaid, the stone hollowed out and turquoise and dark blue tiles set into the sockets in the same shapes. Tilework of this Seljuk kind is found nowhere else in the city.
The interior is by contrast very plain. Under the wooden floor lies the original brick paving. In the middle, on a marble base, stands Mahmud Paşa's cenotaph, with a smaller one belonging to his son towards the door. The building was restored in 1827 and again between 1949 and 1950, and the tile facing was left untouched both times. In the burial ground between the mosque and the tomb lie members of the palace and senior men of religion and state.
The tomb was one piece of a large foundation, and knowing what has survived from it makes the quarter easier to read. Building began in the early 1460s and was finished in 1473-74, and the complex then held a mosque, the tomb, a double bath, a han, a medrese, a public kitchen, a primary school and a court whose nature is not exactly known; a fountain and a sebil were added later. Of all that, the mosque, the tomb, the han, the men's half of the bath and the classroom block of the medrese have come down. The mosque is among the oldest in İstanbul, completed in 1463 according to the Arabic inscription over its main door, which is ornamented with spiral scrolling rumi work. The Hadîkatü'l-cevâmi' records that it was built on the site of a church whose name is not certainly known, but the entry notes there is no information to support this. It is of the zaviye or hostel type in plan and differs from earlier mosques of that kind in some features. Its marble portal, monumental under a muqarnas hood, carries the building inscription with an eight-line Turkish repair inscription of 1755-56 on either side.
The bath west of the mosque is worth finding even in its present use. Its door inscription gives 1466-67, and the entry treats it as a rich continuation of the large bath scale that began with the Tahtakale bath at Edirne, and as one of the oldest baths in İstanbul. It was built as a double bath; the women's half was ruined in a fire in 1755 and demolished in 1878, and the Abud Efendi Hanı was put up in its place. In the men's half that remains, the cold room has a monumental look, with a muqarnas door niche and facade, and the arrangement of the small-domed space towards the changing room, with its fluted half dome, is unusual. The hot room was designed as an octagon with niches on five of its sides, two side eyvans opening off it and four private cells flanking those eyvans. The building was restored in 1953 and worked again as a bath for a while, then became a warehouse, and in the 1990s was turned into a bazaar.
The han is the rarest survival of the group. Mahmud Paşa's han, better known now as the Kürkçü Han, is thought to have been built with the bath during his first grand vizierate between 1456 and 1467, and it is the only han left from the fifteenth century. It has two storeys and two courtyards; a small mosque founded by Hacı Küçük once stood in the large square courtyard, while the smaller courtyard to the north has fallen badly into ruin. Fires damaged the building and it was repaired many times. The medrese, built in 1472-73 east of the mosque, was pulled down and only its classroom of 6.80 by 7.50 metres is left; its plan is little known, but it is understood to have been one of the large medreses of the city, and a library was founded in it for the students' use. A primary school now stands on the rest of its plot. Of the complex's own primary school and public kitchen not a trace remains, and whether the court was a separate building or an institution working in rooms inside the mosque has not been settled. In front of the eastern gate of the mosque courtyard is a four-sided public fountain, with water on three of its pointed-arched, niched faces; another fountain of 1616, built by Hacı Mustafa Ağa of the imperial household on the Nuruosmaniye side of the courtyard, was later taken away, and the sebil he built in the courtyard has not survived.
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).
