The short, stubby minaret of this small mosque in Tokat's Rüstem Çelebi neighbourhood gives it its other name, Güdük Minare Camii; the upper half of the shaft looks to have been rebuilt, probably after earthquake damage. No inscription names its founder or gives its date, but its plan and the early style of its facade decoration, in which stones are framed with brick, place it in the 15th century.
Inside, a large dome covers a square central hall, flanked to the east and west by pairs of smaller domed side rooms that open onto it through two pointed arches each. Only the western side rooms, which served as something like a late-comers' porch, belong to the original building; the eastern ones were added later. All the domes sit on pendentives, and the higher central dome was later covered with a tiled roof. The entrance is a door in the west front, windows on the west and south light the interior, and the east and north walls are blind. The mihrab is a plain niche in the south wall, and the wooden minbar is not original.
The minaret stands on the south side on a very tall square base; its octagonal shaft turns cylindrical as it rises to a single balcony. Between its base and the south-west corner of the mosque is a small fountain set in a plain pointed niche. The walls mix rubble stone and brick, with brick used for the relieving arches of the west front, the domes and the minaret. The decoration is modest: brick-framed stones of varied shapes on the west facade, a saw-tooth cornice under the eaves and the minaret balcony, and two-coloured stone around the door and the fountain niche.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Tokat as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2 °C in January to 22.5 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (59 mm) and lightest in August (9 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
