The Alaeddin Mosque of Konya

The Alaeddin Mosque stands on the flat top of the Alaeddin Hill, the ancient citadel mound that rises in the middle of Konya, the city that was the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the state of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia. It is the chief and oldest of the great congregational mosques of the city, built and enlarged over the reigns of several sultans across the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and completed about 1220, in or near the reign of Alaeddin Kayqubad I, the greatest of the Anatolian Seljuk sultans, whose name it bears. The mosque is a long, low building of stone in the sober and massive early Anatolian Seljuk manner, and its wide prayer-hall is carried on a forest of columns of many different kinds and ages, plainly gathered and reused from the older Greek and Roman ruins of the region, supporting a flat wooden roof; it has a richly carved stone portal and a fine inlaid wooden pulpit. Beside the mosque, on the same mound, stand the domed turbes, the mausolea, in which a line of the Seljuk sultans of Rum were buried, so that the hill was at once the royal mosque, the dynastic burial-place and, together with the palace that once crowned it and has since vanished, the very heart of the Seljuk capital. Konya in this age was a brilliant centre of Islamic art, learning and mysticism, the city of the great mystic-poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. The monument’s reused columns and wooden minbar belong to its architectural history. This exterior panorama does not provide a full view of the hall or a readable minbar.