Reading the architecture
The mosque is a refined, late flowering of an early Ottoman type: the tabhaneli, or 'cell-flanked', layout familiar from 14th- and 15th-century Bursa. Inside, a prayer hall shaped like an inverted T unfolds around two large domes placed one behind the other on the qibla axis, their flanks opening into vaulted eyvan alcoves, while a row of small domed cells wraps around the corners. To create a single, airy worship space, the dividing walls were later lowered and the supporting arches raised—an evolution visitors can still read in the geometry overhead.↗↗
The north façade is dominated by a monumental portal that projects slightly proud of the wall, built in alternating courses of grey and white Afyon marble and crowned with a honeycombed muqarnas hood. Above it sits a five-domed portico resting on slender columns, the central dome heightened to mark the doorway below. But the signature of the whole complex is the minaret: a single-balcony shaft carved into fluted spirals, the grooves inlaid with deep cobalt-blue tile that twists up the column like a band of ribbon. The celebrated 17th-century traveler Evliya Çelebi singled out this 'elegant spiral minaret' and compared its white-marble minbar to the famous one in Sinop.↗↗
Step inside and the craftsmanship keeps rewarding close looking. The mihrab, like the portal, is assembled from striped cut marble beneath a muqarnas niche, while the minbar is fashioned almost entirely from luminous white stone. Look for the interlacing rumi arabesques painted across the great arch between the two domes and into the alcove vaults—much of this painted decoration dates from the 1470s—set against calligraphy and classical patterns renewed in the last century. The original double-leaf wooden doors, worked in the intricate kündekârî parquetry technique with ten-pointed stars, rumi and carnation motifs, are themselves a prized survival of the founder's era.↗↗