Mehmed Paşa had this tomb built while he was still alive, and the verse inscription over its door is his own composition; when he died in 1594 he was buried in it. It stands on Nişanca Caddesi in Fatih, north-east of his mosque and between the two courtyard gates, octagonal in plan, domed, and built entirely of cut stone.
The porch in front rests on four marble columns with diamond capitals, and the doorway beneath it has an interlocking arch of white and red stone with a palmette motif, with a niche to either side. The lower windows have marble jambs and the upper ones honeycomb grilles. The interior is quite plain; several sources speak of two cenotaphs, but only the pasha's wooden one is there now.
The summer sebil in the courtyard wall in front of the tomb was built together with the mosque: three windows, open above, its outer face clad in marble and its windows closed with simple iron grilles, the marble basins still in place behind them. Small burial grounds lie to the north and south of the tomb; Evliya Çelebi records among those buried there two sons-in-law of Nişancı Mehmed Paşa and several other men of learning.
The tomb is one building in a complex that also held a mosque, two medreses, a sebil and a burial ground, with a dervish lodge added later. Its founder was one of the cupola viziers of Murad III's reign and had the work done while he was second vizier, between his last two terms as keeper of the seal; the inscription over the mosque door gives 1584 for the start of building and 1589 for its completion. The building is not listed in the two registers of Sinan's works but is given to him in a third, the Tuhfetü'l-mi'mârîn, and Evliya Çelebi, taking it for Sinan's, called it a mosque as richly and completely made as a sultan's. The encyclopaedia entry points to two things in it that were new for Sinan: the unity of the interior space, not found in his earlier work of this kind, and the return of side rooms of the sort used in the hostel mosques. The projection of the mihrab beyond the wall, which he had taken up in his late mosques, is carried further here — it is not confined to the qibla bay but stepped, drawn back one stage more across the width of the side aisles.
Inside the mosque the details worth stopping for are in the stone. The mihrab is faced with muqarnas, its Qur'anic verse crowned with palmettes, and an hourglass of coloured marble is set into each of its corners. At both corners of the qibla wall stand preaching pulpits of porphyry, reached by stone stairs that run through the thickness of the wall beside the window openings. The minaret, with a single balcony on stalactite muqarnas, is set inside the mass of the building at the northwest, and the stair to the gallery was built as its mirror image at the northeast. Inscriptions on either side of the door to the porch record two thorough repairs: one in 1766-67 in the reign of Mustafa III, paid for by Mehmed Paşa's grandson Şükrullah Efendi, and one in 1835 by the chief jurist Mekkîzâde Mustafa Âsım Efendi. The entry reads the first either as a sign that the earthquake of 1766, which brought down the Fatih mosque, did little damage here, or as the completion of a repair already begun. Work by the foundations administration in 1958 and repairs made with public support in recent years have kept the original architecture.
Of the rest of the complex much has gone. The Hadîkatü'l-cevâmi' records two medreses, one at ground level and one raised, a hospice built from the endowment's income under the pasha's will, and a well in the fountain courtyard; the well still stands in front of the porch, while the medrese is supposed to have occupied the empty ground west of the mosque. Both medreses opened for teaching in 1592-93 with sixteen single rooms each, although the inspection report of 1914 counted nineteen in the lower one. They were repaired during the 1835 work, again in 1847 by the endowment's trustee Kevâkibîzâde Mehmed Said Efendi, the judge of İstanbul, and twice more late in the nineteenth century, and by 1914 both were ruined outright and struck off the establishment. The lodge appears in a document of 14 November 1784 listing the tekkes and hospices of İstanbul, under the name of Bülbülcüzâde Efendi's tekke inside the New Nişancı mosque; its date of building is unknown, but it is placed in the seventeenth century from the death in 1694 of Bülbülcüzâde Şeyh Abdülkerim Fethi Efendi, the first to hold the post. It too was repaired in 1835, and it can be followed to 1905, the year its last sheikh died, after which it probably went in one of the fires that destroyed this quarter.
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).
