Up the Golden Horn to Eyüp - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 373

of drought; and rain is granted them.” If the tomb was still extant
in early Palaeologan times, it seems improbable that it should so
completely have disappeared before the Turkish Conquest. Probably,
Fatih restored or rebuilt it on a grander scale.
The külliye as a whole, originally including the türbe, mosque,
medrese, han, hamam, imaret and market, was built by Fatih Mehmet
in 1458, five years after the Conquest. Here on their accession to the
throne the Ottoman sultans were girded with the sword of Osman,
a ceremony equivalent to coronation. By the end of the eighteenth
century the mosque had fallen into ruin, perhaps a victim of the
great earthquake of 1766 which had destroyed Fatih's own mosque.
At all events, in 1798 under Sultan Selim III, what remained of the
building was torn down and the present mosque erected in its place
and finished in 1800; only the minarets, the gift of Ahmet III, remain
from the older building.
One approaches through an outer courtyard of irregular shape but
great picturesqueness. The two great gateways with their undulating
baroque forms, the staircase and gallery to the imperial loge, the huge
and aged plane trees in whose hollows live lame storks and in whose
branches beautiful grey herons build their nests in spring, the flocks of
pampered pigeons - all this makes the courtyard the most delightful
in Istanbul. From here one enters the inner court, surrounded on
three sides by an unusually tall and stately colonnade and also shaded
by venerable plane trees. The mosque itself in plan is an octagon
inscribed in a rectangle and closely resembles Sinan's Azap Kapı
Camii, though on a rather larger scale and with many baroque details
of decoration. But in spite of its late date the mosque is singularly
attractive with its pale honey-coloured stone, the decorations picked
out in gold, and the elegant chandelier hanging from the centre of
the dome.
The side of the building opposite the mosque is a blank wall, most
of it covered with panels of tiles without an overall pattern and of
many diferent periods, some of them of great individual beauty.
A door in the wall leads to the vestibule of the türbe of Eyüp, an
octagonal building three sides of which project into the vestibule. The
latter is itself sheathed in tiles, many of them of the best Iznik period.