Beyazıt Square, the Mosque & the University Gate
Why is it significant?
Face the huge arched gate on the north side of the square, with its slender towers and its Moorish curves. Students stream through it with coffee cups, pigeons wheel overhead, and behind the gate rises a white stone tower like a lighthouse that lost its sea. This square has worn many names.
Key Facts
| Place | Beyazıt Square, the Mosque & the University Gate |
|---|---|
| Address | Beyazıt Meydanı, Beyazıt, 34452 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.01130, 28.96360 |
| Part of Walk | Sinan's City: Istanbul from the Grand Bazaar to Süleymaniye |
| Generated | Generated |
Face the huge arched gate on the north side of the square, with its slender towers and its Moorish curves. Students stream through it with coffee cups, pigeons wheel overhead, and behind the gate rises a white stone tower like a lighthouse that lost its sea.
This square has worn many names. In Byzantine Constantinople it was the Forum of Theodosius, one of the great ceremonial squares of the city, and fragments of a triumphal arch still lie by the tram line on the main avenue. After 1453, Mehmed II built his first palace here, the Old Palace, before he moved down to the point of the peninsula. Later the site became the Ministry of War, and this gate was its grand entrance, built in the 1860s.
Since 1924, the buildings behind it have belonged to Istanbul University. Which is why the square has been a stage for students, protests and politics for a century. The tower behind the gate is the Beyazıt Tower, rebuilt in stone in 1828 as a fire watchtower. From its top, watchmen scanned the wooden city for smoke and signalled with coloured baskets by day and lamps by night.
Now turn around to the mosque. Sultan Bayezid II, son of the conqueror, built it between 1501 and 1506, and it is the oldest imperial mosque still standing in Istanbul in its original form. Look at how it was designed: a central dome supported by two half-domes, a clear echo of Hagia Sophia, one of the first Ottoman answers to that great church. Sinan, then still a boy in an Anatolian village, would spend his life perfecting that answer.
Locals once called it the pigeon mosque. Legend says Bayezid bought a single pair of pigeons from a poor widow and gave them to the mosque, and that every pigeon in the courtyard descends from them. Now walk west around the university walls. It is a longer leg, gently uphill, to a little shop that has been serving the same winter drink since 1876.