The Twin Minarets

I have already written about the Yakutiye, one of the two great madrasas of Erzurum. The second is the Çifte Minareli—literally, “the one with two minarets.” Its façade, with a pair of slender towers in red brick and turquoise glaze, is not merely the emblem of the city but its official one: the silhouette of those minarets appears in the municipal logo.

It was built at the very end of the thirteenth century, under the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm—about half a century earlier than the Yakutiye, which went up in the early fourteenth century under the Mongol Ilkhanids.

The sultanate named after Rome

The Seljuks were a Turkic dynasty who between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries held an enormous stretch of country from Central Asia to Anatolia. Their arrival in Asia Minor was announced by the Battle of Manzikert (1071), where the sultan Alp Arslan destroyed the army of the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes—a defeat with consequences well outside the region, since it was the resulting collapse of Byzantine Anatolia that eventually sent an emperor’s appeal to the Pope and set the First Crusade in motion.

The victory opened Anatolia, and on former Byzantine soil there arose a state of its own: the Sultanate of Rûm.

Which is a name worth pausing over. In Muslim usage Rûm meant Rome—that is, Byzantium, the Roman Empire as it actually still existed. So “Sultanate of Rûm” means, quite literally, “the sultanate on Roman ground.” Turks ruling Anatolia advertised the fact by naming themselves after the empire they had displaced.

English speakers already own a piece of this. The poet Rumi—Mevlânâ Celâleddîn, the best-selling poet in America for some years now—is not called anything of the sort. Rûmî is an adjective: “the Roman.” He lived at Konya, capital of this same sultanate, and was named for the country he lived in, which was named for an empire in Constantinople, which was named for a city in Italy.

It was under these sultans of Rome that Seljuk architecture came into flower in Anatolia: the great iwan portals, the madrasas, the caravanserais.

The building

The Çifte Minareli belongs squarely to that late Seljuk moment: an open courtyard, a four-iwan plan, a façade with paired minarets. It has the air of a guest from Samarkand, answering the famous ensembles of Bukhara and Samarkand across two thousand miles.

Adjoining the northern iwan is a gombad, a mausoleum with a conical roof. Inside, the dome is astonishing—laid up in concentric rings of dark stone, with narrow windows admitting a hard vertical light, so that the interior reads as a firmament receding into depth.

Whose lady built it?

The madrasa is often called the Hatuniye, the Lady’s, its construction being attributed to a noblewoman: either the Seljuk Hüdavend Hatun, daughter of Sultan Kayqubad I, or the Ilkhanid Padishah Hatun, wife of the khan Gaykhatu. Hence the wobble in the dating: some place the building in the 1250s–70s, others in 1290–91.

No inscription survives, so whose mausoleum the gombad actually became cannot now be established. Which is its own small comment on how history keeps its records: two powerful women, one building, and not a line to say which.

The twelve-petalled sign

On the portals of the cells there are some unusual details. One is a relief with twelve petals—an evident echo of the Armenian eternity symbol ֍, in an extended version.

Twelve is the number of a completed cycle: the months, the zodiac, in Christianity the apostles. In an Islamic setting the motif reads as cosmic order and the harmony of creation.

A bridge and a pair

The Çifte Minareli is not only a thirteenth-century monument but a cultural crossing. Here are a Seljuk plan, an Iranian technique of glazed brickwork, the Mongol notion of combining madrasa with mausoleum, and symbolism related to the Armenian. Yet in the logic of its space and its overall composition it stands closest of all to the madrasas of Samarkand and Bukhara. Small wonder that the silhouette of its paired minarets became the sign of Erzurum: local identity and the widest Central Asian horizons meet in it.

And taken together, the city’s two great madrasas mark a hinge between eras. The Çifte Minareli still belongs to the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, when Anatolia looked towards Bukhara and Samarkand. The Yakutiye was raised under the Mongol Ilkhanids, and its architecture speaks in other cadences—the continuation of Genghis Khan’s single empire and its connections with Iran and China.

As a pair, they are a textbook of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century history, written into the stone of Erzurum.