The Grand Camlica Mosque (Turkish pronunciation: (Turkish: Büyük Camlica Camii) is a complex for Islamic worship that was completed and opened on March 7, 2019. The mosque, located in the Uskudar region of Istanbul, dominates the skyline from its perch atop Camlica Hill. The facility features a museum, a library, and a convention hall. Up to 63,000 people can attend services there simultaneously (it can accommodate up to 100,000 people in case of an earthquake).
It cost about 550 million Turkish liras, or about $110 million, to build the mosque. In the year 2000, two female architects named Bahar Mizrak and Hayriye Gul Totu began working on plans for the Camlica Mosque. In a contest to come up with something appropriate, their design came in second.
On May 3, 2019, Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, formally opened the mosque. The presidents of Senegal and Guinea, as well as Albania’s Ilir Meta and Palestine’s Mohammad Shtayyeh, were among the many world leaders present for the ceremony.
After Istanbul’s Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque and Adana’s Sabanci Merkez Mosque, Camlica Mosque was Turkey’s third mosque to feature six minarets.
In 2022, construction began on a spur to connect the M5 Metro line from Uskudar with the Camlica Mosque.
This mosque was based on the work of Mimar Sinan and other examples of classical Ottoman architecture.
An Exterior View of the Camlica Mosque
Nighttime Mosque
An exterior description of the mosque calls it “a huge box attached to a colonnaded courtyard; on top of the box, domes and half-domes swarm around a squat central dome surmounted by a golden, crescent-shaped finial.” “Its use of concrete has relegated Sinan’s structural devices—the dome-clusters, for example, that he used to diffuse the downward thrust of the main dome — to mere ornament,” the author writes of the building’s exterior design. As the story goes, it was built on the Asian side of Istanbul to compete with Sinan’s world-famous Suleymaniye Mosque on the European side of Istanbul, which is across the Bosphorus.
The 72-meter-tall main dome of Istanbul’s Camlica Mosque is meant to represent the 72 different nationalities represented in the city, while the 34-meter-wide dome stands in for Istanbul itself (34 is the city’s license plate number). The primary dome measures 3.12 meters in width, stands 7.77 meters tall and weighs 4.5 tons. The main gate to the mosque is 5 meters in length, 6.5 meters in height, and weighs 6 tons; it is among the largest gates ever installed inside a house of worship.
The world’s largest mosque, the Camlica Mosque, used nanotechnology to dye its minaret’s crown.
Minarets
These are two of the Camlica Mosque’s six minarets, which reach a total height of 107.1 m. A tourist’s ground-level photo
Each of the six minarets at the Camlica Mosque represents one of the tenets of Islam (iman). In honor of the Seljuks’ 1071 Siege of Manzikert and subsequent victory, four of the six minarets feature three balconies at a height of 107.1 meters. Both of the other minarets are 90 meters high and have two balconies. Two minarets are located on each of the mosque’s ends, while the other four surround the mosque’s central dome.
Interior
The mosque’s interior was created with a minimalist aesthetic in mind. The two women designers claimed they aimed to create a more ethereal atmosphere with their incorporation of “light, color, glass, ornamentation, and calligraphy.”
The Camlica Mosque Complex is home to a plethora of amenities, including a museum, underground parking for 3,500 cars, an art gallery, a library, a conference hall, and even a daycare center. The library occupies 3,000 square meters, while the art gallery takes up 3,500. There is room for 1,071 attendees in the conference hall, and the mosque houses eight different art studios.
The Museum of Islamic Civilizations, located within the mosque, opened to the public in April 2022.
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