In the centre of Nusaybin, the Zeynelabidin Camii complex shares a single courtyard with the Mor Yakup Kilisesi, a monastery church dated to the 4th century that adjoins its east side. The complex itself goes back to the 12th century: the inscription over the tomb door gives the year AH 553, which corresponds to 1159.
The complex, set in an open garden courtyard and built of cut stone broadly on an L plan, brings together the mosque, a minaret added in 1956 on the east side of the courtyard, an ablution fountain, former medrese rooms that now hold a girls' Kuran course and rooms for visitors to the tombs, and a cemetery. The square prayer hall is entered from the north and covered by cross vaults on thick piers; its marble mihrab and minbar are new, and a women's gallery was added above the portico in later repairs.
From the south-west corner of the prayer hall, stone steps lead down into a square domed chamber holding the tomb of Molla Zeynelabidin, a thirteenth-generation grandson of Hüseyin, and beside it to the west the tomb of his sister Sitti Zeynep. Both sarcophagi lie under green covers inscribed with verses, and a repair inscription on the front of Sitti Zeynep's tomb reads 1821.
A large cemetery spreads to the east and south of the mosque. The carved, turbaned sarcophagus-type graves against its east side belong to sheikhs of the Tayyi tribe and date from the late Ottoman 19th century.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Mardin as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3.1 °C in January to 29.9 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (114 mm) and lightest in August (2 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
