Habeşî Mehmed Ağa, chief black eunuch of the palace under Murad III, had his complex at Çarşamba in Fatih built by the architect Davud Ağa; the mosque went up in 1585 and the endowment deed is dated February 1591. The complex originally held a mosque, a dervish lodge, this tomb, a double bath, a medrese and two fountains, though the medrese and the lodge have not survived.
The tomb stands to the south-east of the mosque and is a plain building with a single cenotaph in it. It is of cut stone on a rectangular plan, its corners softened with round columns, and its plain bow-arched door is framed by a rectangular moulding. Two rows of windows light it — jambed and iron-barred below, pointed-arched with painted glass above — and the dome is reached through pendentives from an octagonal drum. The interior is whitewashed now, but it once carried painted decoration. The trace of an arch at the right-hand corner of the front suggests there was formerly a portico along this side of the mosque.
The mosque itself is the reason most people come. Its square prayer hall, with the mihrab side projecting, carries a single dome on eight wall piers and pointed arches, ringed by five half-domes at the four corners and over the mihrab projection, and the eight-part structure is carried up outside in eight round weight turrets around the drum. In front of it a five-bay porch of pendentive domes rests on six marble columns with muqarnas capitals, and a marble portal with slender colonnettes and muqarnas opens into the hall; inside, above the portal, a balcony on stone corbels has an openwork marble balustrade of geometric interlace, with two wooden galleries on either side of the entrance reached by their own stairs.
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).
