Around the Blue Mosque - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 119

of columns, which give them a somewhat forbidding appearance; but
the arrangement as a whole is ingenious and attractive. The building
has recently been rather summarily restored.
THE MOSQUE OF SOKOLLU MEHMET PAŞA
We now return to the street from which we branched of and
continue down to the left; presently a gate leads to the garden and
courtyard of a great mosque. This is one of the most beautiful of the
smaller mosques of Sinan. It was built in A.H. 979 (A.D. 1571-2)
for Ismihan Sultan, daughter of Selim II and wife of the Grand Vezir
Sokollu Mehmet Paşa after whom the mosque is generally called.
This mosque is built on the site of an ancient church, once wrongly
identified as that of St. Anastasia, from which doubtless the columns
of the courtyard were taken.
The courtyard itself is enchanting in design. It served, as in the
case of many mosques, as a medrese; the scholars lived in the little
domed cubicles or cells under the portico. Each cell had its own
window, its fireplace and its recess for books. Instruction was given
in the dershane , the large domed room over the staircase in the west
wall, and also in the mosque itself. Notice the charming ogive arches
of the portico and the fine şadırvan in the centre. The porch of the
mosque forms the fourth side of the court; in the lunettes of the
window are some striking and elegant inscriptions in blue and white
faience. Entering the building, one is delighted by the harmony of
its lines, the lovely soft colour of the stone, the marble decoration
and, above all, the tiles. In form, the mosque is a hexagon inscribed
in a rectangle (almost square), and the whole is covered by a dome,
counter-balanced at the corners by four small semidomes. There are
no side aisles, but around three sides runs a low gallery supported on
slender marble columns with the typical Ottoman lozenge capitals.
The polychrome of the arches, the voussoirs of alternate green and
white marble, is characteristic of the classic period.
The tile decoration in the mosque has been used with singularly
charming efect. Not the entire wall but only selected areas have
been sheathed in tiles: the pendentives of the dome, the exquisite
mihrab section of the east wall, and a frieze of floral designs under