Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The area directly in front of the Galata Bridge, where Yeni Cami
now stands, was in earlier centuries a Jewish quarter, wedged in
between the concessions of the Venetians and the Amalfians. The
Jews who resided here were members of the schismatic Karaite sect,
who broke of from the main body of Orthodox Jewry in the eighth
century. The Karaites seem to have established themselves on this site
as early as the tenth century, at about the time when the Italians first
obtained their concessions here. The Karaites outlasted the Italians
though, for they retained their quarter up until the year 1660, at
which time they were evicted to make room for the final construction
of Yeni Cami. They were then resettled in the village of Hasköy, some
three kilometres up the Golden Horn and on its opposite shore,
where their descendants remain to this day.
YENİ CAMİ
The whole area around the Stamboul end of the Galata Bridge is
dominated by the imposing mass of Yeni Cami, the New Mosque,
more correctly called the New Mosque of the Valide Sultan. The
city is not showing of its great age in calling new a mosque built
in the seventeenth century: it is just that the present mosque is a
reconstruction of an earlier mosque of the same name. The first
mosque was commissioned in 1597 by the Valide Sultan (Queen
Mother) Safiye, the mother of Sultan Mehmet III. The original
architect was Davut Ağa, a pupil of the great Sinan, the architect who
built most of the finest mosques in the city during the golden age of
Süleyman the Magnificent and his immediate successors. Davut Ağa
died in 1599, however, and was replaced by Dalgıç Ahmet Çavuş,
who supervised the construction up until the year 1603. But in that
year Mehmet III died and his mother Safiye was unable to finish
her mosque. For more than half-a-century the partially completed
mosque stood on the shore of the Golden Horn, gradually falling
into ruins. Then in 1660 the whole area was devastated by fire,
further adding to the ruination of the mosque. Later in that year the
ruined and fire-blackened mosque caught the eye of the Valide Sultan
Turhan Hadice, mother of Mehmet IV, who decided to rebuild it as
an act of piety. The architect Mustafa Ağa was placed in charge of the
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