‘Stamboul is submerged in tombs, everyone loves them’, wrote Le Corbusier on his visit to the East in the early part of the 20th century. This was not the case in the early centuries of Ottoman rule where to be buried intra muros was the reserve of the Sultan and members of important families. For burial within the city walls the authorization of the Sultan was required and permission was generally sought when a person sensed the approach of death. The documents relating to issues of burial show that the practice of controlling access to burial within the city walls continued into the 18th century.
The first large mosque to be built within the city walls during the time of Mehmet II, who conquered Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, was that of his chief Vizier, Mahmut Pasha. His tomb, which lies by the side of the mosque, is octagonal in shape and according to the inscription set inside the double arching of the door was built in 1473. The door has no porch and there are small upper and lower windows on each of the other seven sides leaving what the Godfrey Godwin, historian of Ottoman architecture, describes as a disproportionate space, where previously ‘the custom had been for the sill of the upper light to form the top of the frame of the casement below’. Indigo, blue and green glazed brick, restored in 1950, of the Timurid /Tabriz style decorate the exterior and Goodwin believes they could have been imports or gifts from Persian friends as kilns were rare within the Ottoman Empire at that time and tile decoration was yet to become an important feature of architectural decoration in Istanbul.
By the time of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent Ottoman architecture entered a classical period with the appointment of Sinan as court architect. Sinan was born in 1490 into a Christian family. He was conscripted like many Christian youths into the dervsirme and initially trained as a carpenter. He made his reputation as a military engineer, when as a member of the Janissaries he accompanied the Sultan on many of his campaigns, and is reputed to have come to the Sultan’s attention for his skill in building bridges. Many of the tombs of Istanbul attributed to this prolific architect house the bodies of those known to us from history. The resting place of the body of Grand Admiral Barbarossa which overlooks the Bosphorus at Besiktas was built in 1541. Khayr al Din Barbarossa was once governor of Algiers, a city that prospered on piracy and the white slave trade. His mausoleum is a classical octagonal building preceded by a porch carried on four columns of Marmara marble with muqarnas capitals. The uncluttered clear lines and symmetry of the mausoleum show the excellent workmanship which was to become typical of Sinan.
The tragic death of the Sultan’s son Shezade Mehmet, at the tender age of twenty-two, brought Sinan his first major commission. Built behind the mosque complex it was completed in 1548. The octagonal turbe or tomb, faced with marble, is a departure from earlier mausoleums in its ornamental detail and was not repeated in Sinan’s later work. Both dome and drum are fluted with thirty-six ribs. Each facet of the octagon has two upper windows and two lower casements with voussoirs of alternating red and white marble. The octagonal structure below the drum is crested with a richly carved frieze. The panels flanking the doorway are inset with Iznik cuerda seca tiles of blue, primrose, white and green. Inside the decorative theme is that of the garden which is the prevalent decorative motif of Islamic funerary architecture and provides the means of transforming the burial place from the horror of its reality into a sacred space. Entering the mausoleum through its deceptive façade, which looks like that of a pleasure pavilion, and stepping over the threshold into the lavishly decorated space makes the reality of what lies within more palatable. The French philosopher Henri Lefebre considered funerary monuments a ne plus ultra of art stating that ‘every bit as much as a poem or a tragedy, a funerary monument transmutes the fear of the passage of time, and anxiety about death, into splendor’.
Recommended Reading:
A History of Ottoman Architecture: Godfrey Goodwin.
Journey to the East. Le Corbusier.
