Appendices - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 483

buildings, almost always built round four sides of a central arcaded
and domed courtyard, the commonest is the medrese, or college.
The students' cells, each with its dome and fireplace, opened of the
courtyard with a fountain in the middle, and in the centre of one side
is the large domed dershane, or lecture hall. Sometimes the medrese
formed three sides of a mosque courtyard, and very occasionally they
take unusual shapes like the octagonal one of Rüstem Paşa. These
colleges were of diferent levels, some being mere secondary schools,
others of a higher status, and still others for specialized studies such as
law, medicine and the hadis, or traditions, of the Prophet.
Primary schools too (sibyan mektebi) were generally included
in a külliye, a small building with a single domed classroom often
built over a gateway and sometimes including an apartment for the
teacher. Tekkes, or convents for dervishes, do not usually difer much
in structure from medreses, but the dershane room, which may be in
the centre of the courtyard, is used in tekkes for dervish rituals.
The larger imperial foundations included a public kitchen and a
hospital. Like medreses these were built round a central courtyard, and
the hospitals (dar-üş şifa or timarhane) are almost indistinguishable
from them, also having cells for the patients and a large central room
like a dershane used as a clinic and examining office. The public
kitchens (imaret) instead of cells have vast domed kitchens with very
characteristic chimneys, and also large refectories. They provided
food for the students and teachers of the medrese, the clergy of the
mosque, and the staf and patients of the hospital, as well as for the
poor of the neighbourhood. One or two of them still perform the
latter service. All these institutions were entirely free of charge and in
the great period very efficiently managed.
Fountains are ubiquitous. They are of three kinds: the şadırvan
is a large fountain in the middle of a mosque courtyard used for
ritual ablutions; the sebil, often at the corner of the outer wall of
a mosque precinct, is a monumental domed building with three or
more grilled openings in the façade through which cups of water
were handed by an attendant to those who asked; the çeşme is also
sometimes monumental, often in the middle of a public square, but
more frequently it is a simple carved marble slab with a spigot in the