Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
arrangement of a monumental courtyard and substitutes for it, as
it were, an elaborate series of palace-like apartments in two storeys
which forms the western façade of the building; such a plan had first
been tried some 30 years earlier by Mehmet Tahir for the Hamidiye
at Beylerbey, but it became a regular feature of all the Balyan mosques
- for example, those at Dolmabahçe, Yıldız, Ortaköy and Aksaray.
Notice the bulbous weight towers, the dome arches like jutting
cheekbones, the over-slender minarets, so thin that they fell down
soon after construction and had to be re-erected, the ornate bronze
grilles here and there, or look at the interior dripping with marble and
Empire
garlands, and the mimber, a marvellous baroque changeling.
he architect may have been perverse but he certainly had verve.
The founder, Mahmut II the Reformer, called his mosque Nusretiye,
Victory, because it was finished in 1826 just after his triumph over
the Janissaries whom he had succeeded in liquidating.
Along the docks between Kılıç Ali Paşa Camii and Nusretiye Camii
one of the warehouses has been converted into an art museum called
Istanbul Modern, which opened in 2004. The collections include
outstanding works of Turkish artists of the late Ottoman and early
Republic eras, displayed in a very interesting and attractive setting.
Not far beyond Nusretiye Camii, on the heights above, can be
seen the dome and minarets of the mosque of Cihangir, which gives
its name to this upper district. Unfortunately the present building is
of no interest whatever, having been built in 1890 by Abdül Hamit
II. It occupies the site, however, of a mosque by Sinan which was
founded by Süleyman the Magnificent in memory of his hunchback
son Cihangir, who died in 1553 from sorrow, it is said, for his half-
brother, the unfortunate Prince Mustafa, whom their father had just
executed; Prince Cihangir was buried in the türbe of his other brother
Mehmet at the Şehzade. Sinan's mosque was burned down in 1720
and several times thereafter reconstructed and burned down, until
the present rather exceptionally ugly mosque was built, “bigger and
better than the old ones,” as Abdül Hamit boasts in his inscription
over the portal.
On the Bosphorus side of the shore highway in Fındıklı one comes
to the Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi, or Fine Arts Academy, which is
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