Piyale Pasha Mosque, Istanbul

Piyale Pasha Camii stands about a mile inland from the naval arsenal at Kasım Pasha on the Golden Horn's north shore; built in 1573 for Piyale Mehmet Pasha — a Croatian shoemaker's son who became a Muslim, trained in the Palace School and rose to chief admiral and second vezir — by an unknown architect ¹.

The mosque is unique in the classical period: the only one to revert in plan to the multi-domed Ulu Cami type of Seljuk and early Ottoman times — six ample equal domes in two rows of three carried internally on two great red marble columns, with the single minaret unusually centred on the north façade behind a small six-column balcony ². Between the second and third window tiers runs a faience frieze of Quranic inscriptions in white on blue by the calligrapher Kara Hisarı — who also wrote the Süleymaniye's inscriptions — and the mihrab is of finest-period Iznik tiles ². A deep porch with upper galleries on little columns once wrapped three sides — its roofs now gone — and the founder's columned türbe stands behind; the külliye's medrese-tekke, hamam and mektep have all vanished ³.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 326–329 (Piyale Pasha Camii).
• Record created in this batch.