Sultan Abdülmecid's tomb stands in the precinct of the Yavuz Sultan Selim Mosque, on the hill above the Golden Horn. It is a six-sided building under a plain dome. Abdülmecid died on 25 June 1861 and is buried here with his sons.
It is not the only tomb in the precinct, and the others explain why a nineteenth-century sultan was brought to a sixteenth-century mosque. Selim I's own tomb, octagonal and single-domed, sits in front of the mosque's mihrab, with tiled panels flanking its entrance and his mud-stained campaign kaftan laid over the sarcophagus as he had asked. Beside it the six-sided Şehzadeler tomb, its drum carved with the Throne Verse, holds Süleyman the Magnificent's sons Mahmud and Abdullah and his daughters Güherhan and Hüma Şah.
The mosque itself was raised by Süleyman the Magnificent in his father's name on a hill commanding the Golden Horn; the inscription over its portal shows it was begun in 1519 and finished in 1522. Some publications attribute it to Mimar Sinan, but archival documents name the architect as Acem Ali — Sinan had not yet begun working as an architect, and the biographer Sai Çelebi does not count it among his buildings. Built entirely of köfeki stone, it is covered by a single dome 24 metres across, and a sundial is set into the wall beside the inner courtyard gate.
A third tomb once stood here and has since collapsed; it held Ayşe Hafsa Sultan, Selim's wife and Süleyman's mother, and Şah Sultan, a daughter of Selim married to the grand vizier and chronicler Lütfi Paşa. Of the rest of the complex — medrese, primary school, soup kitchen and bath — only the primary school survives, and a girls' school was built where the soup kitchen stood. One of the open-air cisterns of the Byzantine period lies at the mosque.
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).
