The Great Mosque of Divrigi

In the small town of Divrigi, high in the eastern uplands of Anatolia, there stands a monument that is reckoned among the supreme and most singular masterpieces of Islamic architecture: the Great Mosque and its adjoining hospital, built about 1228-1229 in the age of the small Turkish principalities that ruled Anatolia in the shadow of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, before the coming of the Mongols. The mosque was founded by Ahmad Shah, the emir of the local Mengujekid dynasty, and the hospital (a dar al-shifa, for the care of the sick) beside it by his wife, the lady Turan Malik, the two raised together as a single pious endowment, a work of both worship and mercy. The buildings are of grey stone, sober and even plain in their main walls, but they are pierced by a series of doorways carved with such depth, richness and exuberance that they have no parallel: vast portals swelling outward with enormous rosettes and palmettes, interlacing stems, stars and geometric medallions in high, almost sculptural relief, the stone seeming to bloom and overflow, in a manner so unrestrained that it has been called baroque centuries before the European baroque. The carving is the work of master craftsmen whose names are in part recorded, given extraordinary freedom upon the stone. The Great Mosque and Hospital of Divrigi survives intact and is honoured as a unique achievement of the Anatolian Turkish stonemason's art and of the piety of a small frontier dynasty. This scene depicts the mosque and hospital with their carved portals. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.