The Architectural Pedigree of İznik’s 14th-Century Green Mosque in Turkey

Abstract

A monument constructed in the dynastic beginnings of the Ottoman Empire, the 14th-Century Yeşil Camii (Green Mosque), was one of the first buildings sponsored after the conquest of the Byzantine city Nicaea (İznik). Commissioned by Çandarlı Kara Halil Hayreddin Pasha (1364-1387), the mosque became a landmark of a burgeoning Ottoman government that soon reigned over three continents. With the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the centuries-old Ottoman Empire, with all its institutions, was abolished. The Türk Tarih Tezi (Turkish History Thesis) became the propaganda of the nation-state, denoting a national spirit among Turks in all periods of history. In this historicist reading, the Green Mosque became a beacon signifying the zeitgeist of pure national building forms for the Turks. In the late 1930s, the secular appraisal of this thesis began to wane in favor of a religious-ethnic reading. Imperial monuments with an Islamic past came to befit the locus of Turkish identity. Nevertheless, the ideological transformation of the Green Mosque transcended any objectifying vision. The nationalist lens shifted, emphasizing Muslim-Turks over the Turkish race and iterating a formal revelation of the Green Mosque that has perpetuated the long-standing understanding of the building. This essay presents the Green Mosque in view of the texts written by prominent architects and historians, against the backdrop of crossing boundaries between architectural historiography and nationhood of space, from early beginnings to late 1980s.