THE TESTIMONY OF PHOTOGRAPHS: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE GREAT MOSQUE OF BİRECİK

Abstract

Birecik is known to have been a medieval city with its castle overlooking the Euphrates River and its outer walls, and its city gates, known locally as “Urfa Gate” (Bâb-ı Ruha) and “Meçan Gate” (Vâdi-i Ceng), which are understood from their inscriptions to have been built by the Mamlūk Sultan Sayf ad-Din Qa’itbay in the late 15th century. During the Ottoman period in the 16^th century, the city, which became a settlement where ship timber, weapons, ammunition, gunpowder and commercial commodities were stored as the port of Aleppo and Baghdad, preserved its feature of being an important crossroads on the Silk Road, where Far Eastern goods, especially spices and silk from India, were transported by caravans and transported to Mediterranean ports such as Tripoli, Iskenderun and Payas via Haleb and Damascus for centuries.

The Great Mosque of Birecik, which is understood to have once stood on the banks of the Euphrates River and on the southern slopes of the historical castle that crowned the medieval city by rising in the north-western direction of the settlement, is a collection of various buildings that spread over a rectangular residential area extending north-south and which have survived to the present day due to renovations, alterations and extensions carried out at different dates. Currently located in a congested and irregular urban area and surrounded by residential buildings on three sides, the entire western façade of the building, which used to be located on the Euphrates River, was filled in the early 1970s in order to create a wide avenue running along the western shore of the city during this physical change, the original elements of the aforementioned façade were left below the level of the street’s fill soil.

The building, which was published as the “Great Mosque of Birecik” and was photographed by Max von Oppenheim in 1899 for the book “Inschriften aus Syrien, Mesopotamien und Kleinasien” published in 1909 and recorded as “Moschee ed Tekkije el Bahrije” (Bahriye Tekke Mosque), has lost its original plan and structural features over time due to physical interventions carried out at different dates, and its appearance at the end of the 19^th century, when it was documented in photographs, has undergone major changes over time together with the historical urban space in which it is located. On the other hand, it is still possible to make a restitutive assessment by looking at the current plan elements and some spatial arrangements of the group of buildings that make up the landscape, as well as photographs taken from the late 19^th century onwards. These photographs, as well as its structural features, testify to the fact that the “Great Mosque of Birecik” as a whole was the product of late Ottoman construction activities.