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importance, both in its excellence as a building and in its historic
importance in the development of Turkish architecture. The mosque
marks the beginning of the great classical period which continued
for more than 200 years. Before this time, Ottoman architects had
been experimenting with various styles of mosques and had often
produced buildings of great beauty, as in Yeşil Cami at Bursa or Üç
Şerefeli Cami at Edirne; but no definite style had evolved which could
produce the vast mosques demanded by the glory of the new capital
and the increasing magnificence of the sultans. The original mosque
of the Conqueror was indeed a monumental building, but as that was
destroyed by an earthquake in the eighteenth century, Beyazit Camii
remains the first extant example of what the great imperial mosques
of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were to be like.
One enters Beyazit Camii through one of the most charming of all
the mosque courtyards. A peristyle of 20 ancient columns - porphyry,
verd antique and Syennitic granite - upholds an arcade with red-and-
white or black-and-white marble voussoirs. The colonnade is roofed
with 24 small domes and three magnificent entrance portals give
access to it. The pavement is of polychrome marble and in the centre
stands a beautifully decorated şadırvan. (The core of the şadırvan at
least is beautiful - the encircling colonnade of stumpy verd antique
columns supporting a dome seems to be a clumsy restoration.)
Capitals, cornices and niches are elaborately decorated with stalactite
mouldings. The harmony of proportions, the rich but restained
decoration, the brilliance of the variegated marbles, not to speak of
the interesting vendors and crowds which always throng it, give this
courtyard a charm of its own.
An exceptionally fine portal leads into the mosque, which in plan
is a greatly simplified and much smaller version of Haghia Sophia.
As there, the great central dome and the semidomes to east and west
form a kind of nave, beyond which to north and south are side aisles.
The arches supporting the dome spring from four huge rectangular
piers; the dome has smooth pendentives but rests on a cornice of
stalactite mouldings. There are no galleries over the aisles, which open
wide into the nave, being separated from it only by the piers and by
a single antique granite column between them. This is an essential
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