Nusretiye Mosque, Istanbul

Nusretiye Camii stands on the European shore of the lower Bosphorus about 200 metres beyond Kılıç Ali Pasha Camii; it was built for Mahmut II in 1822–26 by Kirkor Balyan, founder of the Armenian architectural family that served the Ottoman sultans through much of the nineteenth century ¹.

The mosque's name means Divine Victory, dedicated by Mahmut II just after his 1826 annihilation of the janissaries — the 'Auspicious Event' of Ottoman history that freed him to create a new army and reform the empire ¹. Paris-trained Balyan blended baroque and Empire motifs — highly un-Turkish, as Eyice remarks, but not without charm and bravura ². The mosque abandons the traditional monumental courtyard: a series of palace-like apartments in two stories forms its western façade, a signature of later Balyan mosques, and its minarets proved so slender they collapsed soon after construction and had to be re-erected ³.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 413–414 (Nusretiye Camii).
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