Guide
The complex at Ulukışla is a menzil külliye — a staging post built to serve a road rather than a town. The portal calls its caravanserai the largest in the country and names the grand vizier Mehmet Paşa as its patron.
The parts fit together as a working unit: a mosque on a nearly square plan under a single dome, a courtyard, an arasta running through the middle of it like a street with 23 shops on either side, a rectangular bathhouse with many small lights in its domes, a stable along the south face of the arasta with hearths and niches in its walls, further stables on the north side of the courtyard, and porticoes facing each other to east and west. A pointed-arched, open-vaulted space at the eastern entrance to the courtyard belonged to the staff.
The north stable is reached through an entrance eyvan set in the middle of the courtyard's north side. It is a wide rectangular space divided into two aisles of equal width by six square piers set in an east–west line, each aisle under a pointed barrel vault. The piers measure 1.70 by 1.70 metres and carry iron rings for tethering animals, driven in about a metre above the floor. Pyramidal hoods stand over the hearths, and fourteen hearths in all are set between the pilasters along the north wall.
The south stable, built on level ground between the mosque and the bath, is largely a copy of the northern one, except that it is entered from one of its short sides. Its east and west fronts match each other: four rectangular buttresses a metre by a metre and a half on each, with a small slit window set high between them.
