A Mosque That Names Itself

Two years after the Saltukids had married their way into three neighbouring houses, they began building a mosque. The patron was Nasireddin Muhammed—son of İzzeddin Saltuk II and elder brother of Mama Hatun, who would inherit the beylik from him twelve years later. The date on an inscription now lost: 575 of the Hijra, 1179 of the Christian era.

The building is still called Atabey Camii, because the Saltukids held the title atabeg: Turkic ata, “father,” plus beg, “bey.” The atabeg was the guardian appointed to a minor prince, an office whose holders discovered with remarkable speed that one could dispense with the prince. In Mosul and Azerbaijan the title founded dynasties; in Erzurum it settled for being a family nickname.

Its other name, Ulu Cami, is quite as talkative. Ulu is Turkic for “great.” Cami comes from Arabic جامع jāmiʿ, “gathering,” an active participle of the root j-m-ʿ, “to collect.” A mosque called cami is by definition the one where the community assembles for Friday prayer, as against the neighbourhood mescit—Arabic masjid, “place of prostration,” which travelled into Spanish as mezquita and thence, by a longer road, into the English mosque. The building’s name therefore says “great congregational mosque” twice over, which is thorough of it.

A Forest of Piers

The hall is a rectangle whose dimensions the sources decline to agree on: 51 by 54 metres according to the provincial authority, 41 by 54 according to Archnet. The discrepancy is less mysterious than it looks—it depends on whether one measures the later additions. Inside are seven aisles running perpendicular to the mihrab wall, a broad central one with three to either side, carried on twenty-eight free-standing piers of L, T and rectangular section, with sixteen more engaged in the walls.

The capacity usually quoted is ten thousand. Turkish sources, working from an interior of some two thousand square metres, arrive at about four and a half thousand. One suspects the first figure of having been arrived at by a guidebook.

What impresses is not ornament, of which there is almost none, but geometry. The massive piers—known locally as elephant’s feet—carry pointed arches, and the eye runs along the aisles, across them, and diagonally between them, as through a hall of mirrors.

One caveat, without which the account would be dishonest: what stands today is not 1179. The mosque has been restored five times—by governor Hüseyin Paşa in 1639, by Ali Efendi in 1826, under Mahmud II, by governor İbrahim Ethem Paşa in 1860, and by the Directorate of Pious Foundations between 1957 and 1964. What survives of the Saltukid building is part of the central aisle and substantial portions of the qibla wall; the vaults and domes have been remade. In the interval, under Murad IV, the mosque did duty as a grain store, an indignity it has borne better than most buildings would.

The Pointed Arch Travels Light

The pointed arch did come to Anatolia from the east. It is in regular use in Islamic building from the eighth and ninth centuries—Qusayr ʿAmra, the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo—and the Seljuks brought it west, so that by the twelfth century Erzurum spoke the idiom fluently.

What usually follows is the handsome conclusion: here, then, is where Gothic came from, by way of Moorish Spain, while Chartres and Cologne go on believing they thought of it themselves. The conclusion deserves detaining, on two counts.

The road, first of all, ran elsewhere. Architectural historians more often trace the European pointed arch through Norman Sicily, Amalfi and Monte Cassino, from which Cluny took it up. Córdoba is a side branch rather than the main line.

More interestingly, the arch does not make a Gothic building. The rib vault and the flying buttress do: a system for throwing weight onto external supports and dissolving the wall into window. The arch is one element of three, and much the most portable. Portable it duly proves. Whole districts of St Petersburg neo-Gothic consist of pointed windows and, architecturally speaking, nothing else whatever; in Almaty, Stalinist classicism with national trimmings sets the same points into its façades, and visitors identify “Gothic” in a building that has never met any. The form travels light. The meaning stays at home.

The resemblance between an arch in Erzurum and one at Chartres is therefore real, and the relationship unproven. The Yakutiye madrasa up the road looks more convincingly Gothic still, having been built by Mongol governors a century and a half after this mosque and with no thought whatever of the Île-de-France.

Elephant Eyes

Besides the elephant’s feet there are elephant’s eyes: two round windows flanking the mihrab—the niche indicating Mecca, which does the work of an apse, only facing south.

Local tradition holds that the windows kept the hours. The patch of light from the left eye lies on the floor as a long ellipse and spends the morning gathering itself in, rounding, tightening; at the moment it becomes a true circle the muezzin is wanted on the minaret for zuhr, the noon prayer. When the right-hand patch performs the same trick, it is time for asr, in the afternoon.

No measurement I can find supports this. The story lives in guidebooks, on Erzurum forums and in the mouths of guides—a genre in which accuracy has never been the leading virtue. But in a building whose entire argument is geometry, a circle of sunlight arriving punctually at an hour of prayer is too apt to be waved away. Call it a hypothesis that the building endorses with some warmth.

The Swallow Above the Mihrab

The roofing is the most eloquent thing in the mosque. The dome before the mihrab is built of timber beams laid in courses, each course turned and set inward, so that every ring is smaller than the one below. Turkish calls it a kırlangıç kubbe, a “swallow dome”—kırlangıç being the bird—after the nest that is built up in narrowing layers.

The construction is of the steppe: the same principle roofs the Central Asian dwelling and the Anatolian tandır house with its smoke-hole—the very thing reconstructed in the museum inside the Yakutiye madrasa, where the dome over the crossing repeats the scheme in stone. Over the crossing here, however, is a solution from an entirely different world—a vault with transitions through muqarnas, the “stone stalactites” of the Iranian and Mesopotamian tradition.

So within thirty metres of one another, in a single building, stand the tent and the palace. The mosque is named in two languages and titled in the tradition of a third. The Saltukids declared no synthesis; they built with what came to hand. The manifesto is the clearer for not having been intended.