Ottoman mosque · 1492
A mosque of 1492 on the terrace below Kale, with a 16.3 m dome and a 47 m minaret, largely as built.
These are the stories you can open in the 3D view, each at its own numbered point on the model.
This is the Mustafa Pasha Mosque, built in 1492 on a terrace above the Old Bazaar, between Kale, the Church of the Holy Saviour and Kuršumli An.
Its founder, Mustafa Pasha, later served as a vizier of the sultans Bayezid II and Selim I. The mosque has come down to us largely as it was built.
The prayer hall is a square room under a single dome 16.3 metres across. An octagonal zone, pierced by small windows, carries the round dome over the square walls.
The dome is covered in sheets of lead, and so is the tall cone of the minaret.
The minaret rises 47 metres. Its slender, many-sided shaft is built of pale cut stone. Carved stalactite corbels, called muqarnas, carry the single balcony, the şerefe, from which the call to prayer was once given.
Above it a short upper shaft ends in a tall cone covered in lead.
Before the door stands a portico of pointed arches on stone columns, each bay under its own small dome.
The building is set on the qibla, the direction of Mecca: the door faces north-west, and the mihrab, the prayer niche, is in the south-east wall opposite.
The walls are built of alternating courses of cut stone and brick, which gives them their banded look.
Rows of windows light the hall: rectangular ones low down, pointed arches above them and smaller openings near the top. With its portico, the building measures about 28 by 22 metres.
The mosque was once the centre of a larger endowment with a türbe, a fountain, a public kitchen (imaret) and a school (medrese).
Of these, the türbe, an eight-sided tomb under a dome east of the hall, and the ablution fountain survive. According to the Macedonian Wikipedia, the türbe holds the sarcophagus of Mustafa Pasha’s daughter, Umi.
In the yard in front of the portico stands the şadırvan, the fountain where worshippers wash before prayer. It is one of the two parts of the old complex still standing.
Here it is drawn as a stone basin under a small roof on columns; the details of the model are an estimate.
The 1963 earthquake damaged the mosque, and it was repaired afterwards. A five-year restoration funded by Turkey was completed in August 2011.
Today a rose garden surrounds the building, and from the terrace you look down over the roofs of the bazaar.
Typical prices are our estimates for orientation, not menu prices. Check opening hours on the spot.
Walk around the model, switch between day and night, and hear each story read aloud in English, Macedonian or Turkish.
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