The bridge crosses the Sakarya river and is built of large cut stone. Its inscription records that it was raised by Bayezid II, son of Mehmed the Conqueror, in the year 901 of the Hijra, 1495.
It was designed by Bayezid's architect and engineer, Fakir Abdullah, and rests on fourteen piers, four of which stand in the river itself. On the Ali Fuat Paşa side there are nine small arches. Directly under the middle of the bridge is a large pier shaped like a sarcophagus, with two large arches to its right and another large arch on its other side.
The bridge lies on the old post roads. It is 150 metres long and 5.60 metres wide, with parapets 35 centimetres thick, so that it measures 6.30 metres across overall; the parapets stand 1.05 metres high.
Of its fourteen openings, two arches later collapsed and were repaired with iron; three pointed arches remain standing, and the nine round arches on the land side are small. The piers have triangular cutwaters upstream and five-sided ones downstream. Only one relief opening survives today.
The main inscription is on the rear face of the mihrab that stands on the Geyve side. Around the inscription that gives the year 1495–96 runs ornament in the hatayi manner, and this is part of what makes the little inscription pavilion notable: in a band a tenth of a metre wide, curving stems carrying rumi and peony ornament continue a tradition of the first half of the fifteenth century while reflecting the taste of their own moment. The work thus records what Turkish ornament favoured at a fixed date at the end of that century.
In the Republican period a steel frame was set beneath the main bridge, and the bridge has been restored twice in earlier years.
On an islet to the north of the bridge stand the ruins of a bridge of the Byzantine period, which survive to this day. The bridge is reached by asphalt road in all four seasons and is open to traffic.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Sakarya as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.3 °C in January to 23.6 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (106 mm) and lightest in August (48 mm). Long-term means for 1951-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
