A walled courtyard on level ground encloses this Süleymaniye Camii in Edirne, a rectangular building of dressed stone with brickwork in places. Its façades are divided by mouldings into three levels: the main walls, a squinch zone and a sixteen-sided drum pierced by eight round-arched windows.
The walls follow a regular window pattern of three below, two above and one in the squinch zone, on the qibla side and on the south-west and north-east façades alike, except that the lowest window at the north end of the north-east side was turned into a door. The lower windows have marble frames, iron grilles and pointed-arch pediments; the upper ones are pointed and filled with stained glass. The minaret stands at the north corner on a five-sided base enlivened with pointed niches, red stone colouring the spandrels of their arches, but its shaft has collapsed. The late-comers' porch, once three bays under three domes on pointed arches, has not survived either; the two lower windows on that front have arches of coloured stone, unlike the rest.
The cut-stone portal projects from the façade, its muqarnas-hooded niche framed by mouldings and flanked by two smaller muqarnas niches facing each other. Inside, the dome rests on shell-shaped squinches over a square prayer hall. The semicircular mihrab has a shell-shaped hood, with a plain marble minbar to its right and a small niche used as a shelf to its left. The wooden women's gallery on the north side is not original.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Edirne as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2.8 °C in January to 24.8 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in December (71 mm) and lightest in August (23 mm). Long-term means for 1930-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
