Grand Mosque of Bursa

About

The Grand Mosque of Bursa, known in Turkish as the Ulu Cami, is one of the great early monuments of Ottoman religious architecture. It rises in the heart of Bursa's old city, set among the historic markets and caravanserais that have grown up around it.

The mosque was raised by Sultan Bayezid I 'Yıldırım' as a thanksgiving for his victory at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, in which a Crusader army was decisively turned back. Construction was completed in 1399.

The Ulu Cami is considered one of the most important mosques in Bursa and a defining work of the formative period of Ottoman architecture, when the earlier inverted-T (zaviye) plans of Bursa gave way to broader, multi-domed congregational prayer halls. Its commanding presence in the old city remains central to Bursa's identity as the cradle of the Ottoman state.

History

The mosque was commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, and was built between 1396 and 1399 by the architect Ali Neccar, with its carved walnut minbar completed in 1400. A popular tradition holds that Bayezid, having vowed to build twenty separate mosques, instead raised a single mosque crowned with twenty domes. Over the centuries it suffered repeated damage, including a fire attributed to Timur's forces in 1402 and a severe earthquake in 1855 that collapsed the roof, with major repairs completed in 1889.

Significance

A major monument of early Ottoman architecture, the Grand Mosque is the largest mosque in Bursa and its twenty-dome hypostyle hall represents the culmination of the multi-domed plan inherited from the Anatolian Seljuk tradition. Its walls and pillars carry 192 monumental inscriptions in 87 compositions by 41 leading Ottoman calligraphers, earning it a lasting reputation as a living museum of Islamic calligraphy, while a rare şadırvan fountain rises beneath an open central dome at the heart of the prayer hall. The mosque is inscribed as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Bursa and Cumalıkızık: the Birth of the Ottoman Empire.

Architecture

Early Ottoman architecture evolved from the Anatolian Seljuk tradition; a rectangular hypostyle (multi-domed) mosque of twenty domes arranged in four rows of five over twelve pillars, with two minarets and an interior şadırvan ablution fountain set beneath an open, now glazed, central dome; later Ottoman Baroque decorative additions from the 19th century