Grand Mosque of Bursa (Ulu Cami)

About this place

The story Bursa likes to tell is that Sultan Bayezid I vowed to build twenty mosques if he won at Nicopolis, and when he did win, in 1396, he built one mosque with twenty domes instead. True or not, the result is in front of you: a vast hall of roughly 55 by 69 metres, carried on twelve stone piers in four rows, with twenty domes packed shoulder to shoulder above. It was finished in 1399 and is usually credited to the architect Ali Neccar, and it is the largest and most ambitious of the early Ottoman multi-domed mosques in the Seljuk manner, a type the Ottomans soon abandoned for the single soaring dome you know from Istanbul. What justifies the trip, though, is the walls, not the ceiling. Across the piers and surfaces hang 192 monumental calligraphy panels by 41 Ottoman calligraphers, most written between 1778 and 1938, in jeli thuluth, Kufic and tughra forms: Quranic verses, hadith, the ninety-nine names of God. Few mosques anywhere hold this much calligraphy under one roof, which is why locals call it the calligraphy museum. Ask anyone to point you to the giant letter waw, the most famous panel here and the subject of more legends than one letter should have to carry. The walnut minbar, made in 1400 in the kündekari technique that locks pieces together without nails, is said to map the solar system in its carvings, a charming claim nobody has managed to prove. To its left hangs a curtain from the door of the Kaaba, by tradition sent by Selim I after the conquest of Egypt. In the middle of the hall itself, not in a courtyard, sits an eighteen-sided ablution fountain beneath a dome that was once open to the sky and is now glazed, so light falls onto running water and the sound of it fills the whole building. The mosque has not had an easy life: Timur's army burned it in 1402, the Karamanids vandalised it in 1412, and the 1855 earthquake brought down eighteen of the twenty domes; the roof was only rebuilt by 1889. It looks today as if none of it ever happened. Entry is free and the mosque is open daily from dawn to the night prayer, closing to visitors around each prayer and for much longer at Friday noon, when the crowd spills onto the pavement. Modest dress and shoes off are a given. It stands on Atatürk Caddesi in the dead centre of town with the hans district and the silk merchants of Koza Han directly behind it, so make it the first stop on a walk through old Bursa. Half an hour to an hour is plenty, and families are comfortable here: one carpeted hall, no stairs, and pushchairs parked at the door.