Yıldırım Bayezid Mosque, Bursa

The imperial külliye of Yıldırım Beyazit Cami was built in 1390–6 by Beyazid I on a hilltop east of Bursa's centre ¹. Badly damaged in the 1855 earthquake and repaired in 1878 and 1948, it lost both minarets — one in 1855 and one in 1949 — whose bases remain at the north-east and north-west corners ¹. Of the original külliye only the mosque, one of the two medreses and the türbe survive ¹.

The façade is handsome marble and cut stone; a five-domed porch leads through a domed vestibule to a cross-axial interior flanked by zaviyes with flat-topped cross-vaults, fireplaces and storage niches ¹. The main eyvan is framed by a 'Bursa arch' — a shallow bow-flattened arch like a drawn Turkish bow — the first appearance of this form in Ottoman architecture after Seljuk precedents ¹. Below the mosque stand the medrese with its twenty cells and the domed-cube türbe; Beyazit was buried there only in 1406, when his son Çelebi Mehmet recovered his remains ².

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 56–57 (Yıldırım Beyazit Cami).
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