Kadırga Sokullu Camii`nin Sinan`ın altı destekli camileri arasındaki yeri

Abstract

Mimar Sinan, Klasik Osmanlı Mimarisinin en önemli şahsiyetlerinden başta gelenidir. Kadırga Sokullu Mehmet Paşa Cami-Medresesi de strüktürel bütünlüğü ve yapının araziye uydurulması bakımından Mimar Sinan'ın en güzel eserlerinden biridir. Minaresi de dahil olmak üzere iyi durumda günümüze ulaşmıştır. Altıgen planın Mimar Sinan'dan önce Edirne Üç Şerefeli Camii ile başlayıp Sinan döneminde Sinan Paşa ve Kara Ahmet Paşa camilerinde geliştirilip Kadırga Sokullu camisinde en mükemmel hale getirildiği rahatlıkla söylenebilir. Derinlik, genişlik ve kubbe yüksekliğine oranla azdır fakat bu faktör genel mimariyi bozmamıştır. Sinan'ın Selimiye'de sekizgen planda yakaladığı abidevi mükemmelliğin daha ufak boyutta İstanbul'daki temsilcisidir. Camiyi üstün kılan özellikler arasında süslemelerin yapı ile uyumu da sayılabilir.

The Sokullu Mosque at Kadırga was built between the years 1571 and 1572 for the Grandvizier Sokullu Mehmet Paşa and his wife Esmahan Sultan who was the daughter of Sultan Selim II. Besides the medium sized mosque, the complex has a medrese in his courtyard and a cloister; yet, these units have not been examined within the context of this thesis. In the inscription above the door of the main gateway it is stated that a church existed on the same land. The site of the complex is an irregular polygon, very steep in the east-west direction reaching to an elevation difference of eight meters. The mosque and the medrese with their commun courtyard are placed at the lower part of the site. The main entrance is at the northwest and Sinan designed a very clever staircase under an arch that carries the largest room of the medrese to cope with the five meters difference between the street and court levels. The outside porch for late prayers has seven cupola-covered bays with the central cupola being higher. The northwest facade has niches, side entrances, Iznik tiles panels and windows that are not very different from other sixteenth century mosques. The interior of the mosque is accessible via a monumental portal decorated with mukarnas patterns. This northwestern facade of the building has two other entrances - one small door leads to the minaret while the other leads to the galleries. There are stairs built in the thickness of the buttress which is located to the right of the entrance portal. These stairs give access to the upper galeries. The mosque interior is a rectangular space of 18.80 meters by 15.30 meters. The dome of 13.00 meters diameter is supported by a hexagonal base of arches with massive buttresses at the entrance, polygonal pilasters on either side of the prayer hall and shallow pilasters framing the mihrab on the southeast side. The polygonal pilasters are the most characteristic detail of the Mosque of Sokullu. The upper part of this very small mosque, which combines the dome with two sets of two half domes in an ingenious manner, has resulted in the creation of a wide, shallow, rectangular space as the interior. But in this interior, which is very high over its whole width, the architect turns the now completely exposed side galleries into arbitrary additions, the two freestanding columns or pillars are replaced by a single very heavy pilaster whichis necessitated by the upper construction, but which projects out of the side walls with its sloping sides into the lower structure It has likewise not the slightest connection with the galleries. The side galleries are narrow and very low the latter made possible by the use of horizontal slabs for the ceiling. The entrance wall, on the other hand, has galleries at different levels and a separate müezzin mahfeli. The height of the building challenged the architect with the access to the galleries, but Sinan could cope with the situation by giving access to the galleries after reaching to a higher gallery right above the entrance. The latter again is perfectly placed under a high entrance vault to save from a protruding entrance and is also supporting the high gallery above itself. In the Sokullu Mosque, the hexagonal piers on either side of the central area are replaced by pilasters with chamfered corners half way along the outside walls. The subsidiary domes are reduced to half domes which link up obliquely towards the outside with the hexagonal sides and which are no longer independent units simply serving to enlarge the width of the total span of the upper part of the building in a transverse direction. The determination of form from this dome construction, which acquires validity from the top downwards, has somewhat limited the extreme extension sideways but the effect is still that of a sideways extension. Here the longitudinal accents seem to play no part and the lower part of the building, which appears rectangular from outside, remains completely intact. Being limited by the overall area of the mosque complex, the architect had to plan the depth of the mosque building less than both its width and its height. Yet this turned out to be a great interior space with the perfectly placed Iznik tiles on the kıble wall above the windows and even on the pendentives. From the exterior, the Sokullu Mosque offers a clear movement of pure geometrical forms - especially the domes in different diameters - supported by the stratification defined by a clear molding at each stratum. The side turrets and the projecting part of the northwest abutments provide the originality of the central mass of the mosque. The minaret is quite independent from the rest of the mosque exterior in the sense that it interrupts the continuous lines of the cornices with its intruding vertical body. Yet, no special arrangement has been done in this respect and moreover, no structural connection exists between the building and the minaret. In terms of interior decoration, the Sokullu Mosque offers a complete originality and uniquenessof design over its contemporaries. The use of tiles on pendantives is a property shared only with the Rüstem Paşa Mosque in Istanbul. The bulk of tile decoration appears on the central bay of the mihrab wall which includes both large and small panels with floral patterns as well as calligrafic borders. Yet this area enriched with different colors and forms does not express a unity in itself. The motifs are flowering plants, coiling stems with saz leaves and floral arabesque patterns. The size of tiles varies from 8.5x24.5 cm on the borders to square tiles of 22.5x22.5 cm which makes one think that the sizes were dependent on the area to be covered and 1/1 scale drawings were designed on the spot and sent to İznik.The ceilings of the entrances, of the main staircase, of the arcades and the cupolas of the porch were all painted. These were on plaster or stucco. The protruding part of the gallery at the entrance carries some of these paintings presumably from the sixteenth century. The paint on the ceiling of müezzin mahfeli is more probably from the eigteenth century. The windows are filled with colored glass especially on the mihrab wall. The design of the windows is most probably dating to the eighteenth century although it is acceptable that some fragments of the original sixteenth century can be found in the newer windows. Simple stalactite capitals with rows of prismatic shapes were used throughout the mosque. A simpler form with its smaller triangular elments was used in the upper gallery. Kadırga Sokullu Mosque is a great final statement of Sinan's experiments on hexagonal plan mosques. Yet one needs to examine the development of this particular mosque form starting with the Üç Şerefeli Mosque in Edirne dating back to the mid-fifteenth century. Üç Şerefeli Mosque was built between 1438 and 1447. It marks the first use of a vast dome that is twenty-four meters in diameter supported by two hexagonal piers each located between the central area and the wings. One can see Üç Şerefeli' s dome as the `most important development in the structure of the mosque in the fifteenth century`. This property as well as the hexagonal plan can be found in Sinan's Sinan Paşa Mosque in Istanbul over a hundred years later. Built between 1553 and 1555, Sinan Paşa Mosque carries the problem of the triangles at the meeting of the central dome with the pairs of lateral domes as in the Üç Şerefeli yet shows an improvement over its predecessor in terms of its less massive free-standing columns and its proportionally more lofty but smaller dome. One also notices the lighter and more decorative arches. On either side of the dome are placed two smaller domes for the widening of the prayer hall. No galleries are present in the Sinan Paşa Mosque. The principle of the Üç Şerefeli Mosque was repeated once again over a hundred years later by Sinan in his Sinan Paşa Mosque at Istanbul. The piers are now much less massive and the arches have become lighter and more decorative, but no new aspects have appeared here. Sinan uses the form of Sinan Paşa, but resolves the problems, with the building of Kara Ahmet Paşa Mosque in 1554 located at Topkapi. The dome of this mosque is supported by six antique columns. Moreover, two half domes open over each wing towards the north and south walls and the arches behind the latter supporting the east and west galleries. Rectangular buttresses are placed in the middle of the galleries. They not only take the thrust of the central columns but also provide access to the galleries via the stairs placed through them. The two columns XIagainst the north and south walls transmit the pressure of the central dome to butresses inset into the wall. Small exedras placed at the corners formed by the north and south walls and the galleries, and again between the central buttresses of the east and west walls and the galleries help carry the weight of the half-domes. By reducing the side domes to half-domes set at forty-five degrees to each other, the wings become an integral part of the mosque. Another hexagonal plan mosque built by Sinan after the completion of Kara Ahmet Paşa is also in Istanbul located at Fındıklı by the Bosphorus. Built as a mosque complex for Molla Çelebi in 1561, it has lost its Quranic school and its bath over the centuries. It is debatable whether Molla Çelebi Mosque has made any important contribution to Sinan's development or not. It was planned by Sinan but finished probably in the absence of the master. The lack of capitals as a transition element between the arches and the piers is a stronghold for this argument. The dome has a diameter of 11.80 meters, its drum sits on a hexagon whose corners are supported at the northern wall by two independent octagonal piers, on the sides by protruding poligonal buttresses and at the southern wall by the tip of the mihrab niche. The semidome covering the mihrab area is larger in diameter than the semidomes of the central space. Windows have been placed into the curve of these semidomes by opening stunted tunnel vaults. The mosque of Semiz Ali Paşa in Babaeski is another work of Sinan with the hexagonal plan. Here the corners of `the exposed square base of the dome are extended to act as a pair of buttresses on the south side, but on the north they are incorporated into the great arch across the facade. The four angle buttresses of the dome itself are set on these extensions of the base, and two more pairs are set above the buttresses arising from the inward piers on the east and west. Both Fındıklı Molla Çelebi Mosque and Babaeski Semiz Ali Paşa Mosque have an additional half dome each on the apse wall. The evolution here is the size of the additional half dome reduced to the size of the other four surrounding the main dome in the second one namely Babaeski Semiz Ali Paşa Camii. When Sinan started the Sokullu Mosque, he was already working on his second Sultan's mosque for Selim II. However, this building has an octagonal plan due to structural reasons associated with the monumentality of it. The hexagon cannot be used as powerfully as in the Kadırga Mosque with a much larger dome having a rectangular ground plan. Sinan's choice of eight piers for the Selimiye saved him from using half domes that would have damaged the overall effect created by its impressive dome and the uniqueness of the design. While Selim's mosque is considered as the masterpiece of Sinan in terms of monumentality combined with the purity of design, Sokullu's is an equally important achievement of the much preferred hexagonal plan allowing the best of tiles, calligraphy, stone carving, stained glass and woodwork in a very user friendly, beautifully proportioned structure. The hexagonal support system for the dome was continued after Sinan in several mosques. The earliest structure is the Hacı İvaz Mosque in Eğrikapı, Istanbul xu(1580's ). Sinan's student, Architect Davut signed the Cerrahpaşa Mosque (1593) with six half-domes under the central dome. A very close example to the Cerrahpaşa Mosque, The Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa Mosque in Istanbul is the last representative of the hexagonal form in the eighteenth century. Although this form never attained the popularity of the Şehzade Mosque with its four half domes or the Mİhrimah Mosque in Edirnekapi with its tympanum walls carrying the central dome, within the context of Islamic architecture it was experimented and successfully executed only by the Ottoman architects. xui