Nasrullah Mosque

Nasrullah Mosque stands on the main square of Kastamonu, right by the water: beneath its wall runs the Karacomak stream, confined in a stone channel and crossed by an old arched bridge. The mosque was built in 1506, under Sultan Bayezid II, by the local judge Nasrullah, and from his name come those of both the square and the bridge. The building belongs to the early Ottoman type of multi-domed mosque: nine domes rest on six square piers, and in front of the entrance stretches a narthex of another seven domes on ten columns. There are two minarets, which is rare for a provincial mosque. In the northern courtyard is a large sadirvan - an ablution fountain under a canopy, around which people are always sitting during the day. The mosque has been thoroughly repaired three times: in the mid-eighteenth century, in the mid-nineteenth and in 1945, so the masonry outside is visibly of different periods. The square in front of it remains the centre of the town - the shopping streets converge here, people feed the pigeons and arrange to meet. The mosque was the centre of a whole complex with a medrese and a library, and some of its buildings around the square have survived.

Address

Nasrullah Meydanı, Kastamonu

On the map