Tekkiye Mosque

The Tekkiye Mosque (Tekkiye al-Sulaymaniyya) in Damascus is one of the finest Ottoman-period architectural complexes in the Levant and a masterpiece of the great Ottoman court architect Mimar Sinan. The complex was commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and constructed between 1554 and 1559 on the western outskirts of Damascus along the Barada River as a charitable foundation for travelling Ottoman pilgrims on their way to the Hajj — a tekkiye in Ottoman terminology being a hospice or lodge offering accommodation, meals and religious facilities. The complex includes the mosque itself with its single central dome and twin pencil-thin Ottoman minarets, a large arcaded courtyard with a central pool, accommodation cells for visitors arranged around the courtyard, a hospital, a kitchen for the poor (imaret), and a soup kitchen — the standard waqf-complex programme that Sinan refined in dozens of similar imperial Ottoman foundations across the empire. A second smaller complex, the Madrasa Selimiye, was added beside it in 1566 by Suleiman's son Sultan Selim II. The classical Ottoman architectural style — the cascade of domes, the alternating black-and-white ablaq stonework of the lower walls, the slender pencil minarets — represents an important early example of imperial Ottoman religious architecture imported into the Arab provinces of the empire. The complex remains a working mosque and is one of the most visited Ottoman monuments in Syria.