Bayezid II's tomb stands behind his mosque on Beyazıt Square, on the mihrab side and level with the windows. It is octagonal and built of white küfeki stone, the same limestone as the mosque itself. The tomb to its left belongs to his daughter Selçuk Hatun.
The building exists against its founder's wishes. His endowment deed asked that he be buried near the tomb of Eyüp Sultan, according to the prescriptions of religious law; his son Selim I had this tomb raised for him here instead and had him buried in it. The mosque it belongs to was begun in 906 (1500) and finished in 911 (1505), and was the second great complex of the Ottoman rebuilding of the city after Mehmed II's own.
The mosque the tomb belongs to is worth reading as its setting. Who designed it is still unsettled: Mimar Kemaleddin and Mimar Hayreddin were long named, and a later source put forward Yakub Şah bin Sultan Şah. The district governorate's account is that all three worked on the Bayezid complex, but which of them led it is not known, and one view has Hayreddin there as the man in charge of the water supply.
Its plan is a central dome carried on four square piers, buttressed by two half-domes towards and away from the mihrab, with four smaller domes down each side. The dome, about 16.8 metres across, has twenty windows. The courtyard is held up by twenty columns of green, grey, pink and red granite under twenty-four domes; the inscription over its main gate, giving the years the work began and ended, is in the hand of Şeyh Hamdullah, and the dome on eight green marble columns at its centre was added by Murad IV. Of the two minarets, the right-hand one is the original, and the architectural historian İ. Aydın Yüksel describes it as the only example in İstanbul of the passage from Seljuk to Ottoman building.
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).
