Hacı Bayram Mosque

About this place

A single wall separates the tomb of a Sufi sheikh who died in 1430 from a Roman temple carved with the political testament of the Emperor Augustus, the most complete copy to survive anywhere in the world. That odd adjacency is what lifts Hacı Bayram Mosque above being just another old Ottoman mosque: it is the spot where Roman Ankara and Muslim Ankara stand a few paces apart, in the heart of the old Ulus quarter. The mosque went up around 1427, in the lifetime of Hacı Bayram-ı Veli himself, founder of the Bayramiyye, usually counted as the first Sufi order established by an Anatolian Turk; he was buried three years later in a tomb built against the qibla wall. What you see today is the product of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enlargements: plain stone walls outside, and inside, blue-and-white Kütahya tile panels, a painted timber ceiling and a carved wooden minbar. It is modest in scale and warm in feel, nothing like the grandeur of Istanbul's imperial mosques, but that was never the point. The point is the tomb. Hacı Bayram is Ankara's patron saint in all but name, and the queue at the türbe never really stops: families reciting the Fatiha, students before exams, mothers with small children in tow. On Fridays, through Ramadan and on the holy nights the crowd becomes serious, so come on a weekday morning if you want quiet. The square around it was cleared and rebuilt in the last decade with shops selling prayer beads, Qurans and Ankara sweets; it is a pleasant place to wander with children, almost step-free, and a pushchair rolls through easily. You cannot enter the Temple of Augustus, which is closed to visitors, has spent recent years behind restoration fencing and is viewed from the square, but whenever the scaffolding allows, the Latin and Greek inscriptions on its outer wall are legible in daylight and worth a few minutes of your attention. Mosque and tomb are free, with the usual rules: headscarf for women, shoes off. The whole visit takes thirty minutes to an hour, and pairs naturally with Ankara Castle and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, about a quarter of an hour's walk uphill, in a single morning.