Zeyrek Mosque (Pantokrator Monastery)

Historic · ZeyrekIstanbul,Türkiye

Three twelfth-century Byzantine churches joined into one mosque, the largest such building left in Istanbul after Hagia Sophia, with emperors buried in the chapel between.

Zeyrek Mosque is the largest Byzantine church still standing in Istanbul after Hagia Sophia, and it is really three churches built shoulder to shoulder. Inside, the space feels tall and bare, its brick arches stripped back to bone. Underfoot lies its greatest treasure, and you will mostly not see it. A floor of coloured marble, among the finest to survive from Byzantium, lies under carpet so that footsteps do not grind it away. A long restoration has left the interior quiet and luminous. Outside, the mosque stands amid steep lanes of leaning wooden houses with the Golden Horn glinting below. Empress Eirene raised the first church in the twelfth century for the Monastery of Christ Pantokrator. After her early death John II Komnenos added a second and joined the pair with a domed chapel, a mausoleum where emperors of two dynasties were laid to rest. The monastery also ran a hospital renowned far beyond the city. After 1453 the complex passed to a scholar named Molla Zeyrek, whose lessons gave the mosque and the hill around it their name. The streetscape outside is among the oldest left in Istanbul.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The famous floor is under carpet — the Byzantine marble is covered to keep footsteps from wearing it out; what shows is at the edges, where the carpet stops short of the walls.
Step out to the terrace — the open platform on the Golden Horn side of the mosque frames the water and the Galata skyline; the view alone justifies the climb.
You may have it to yourself — Zeyrek sits off the main tourist circuit; often it is just you, the caretaker and a handful of people at prayer.
It is a working mosque — shoes off at the door, shoulders and knees covered, and slip in quietly between prayers; the hush is part of the place.

Things to do

1
Find where three churches meet
Stand at the centre of the prayer hall and turn slowly. Trace where the arches change rhythm and the ceiling shifts height — those seams are where two churches and a funeral chapel were fused into one. The dividing openings were cut centuries ago; the Byzantine plan is still legible above you.
2
Circle round to the apses
Walk the sloping lane behind the mosque to reach the three curved apses, the part few visitors ever see. Look up at the banded brick and the hollow niches set into the curves, then let your eye fall to the Golden Horn below and the tangle of wooden houses climbing the fourth hill around you.
3
Walk the quarter that is listed too
The lanes downhill from the mosque are not a backdrop to the monument — the settlement itself is one of the four zones UNESCO listed in 1985. Walk down toward the Golden Horn and look at what earned that: rows of timber houses, some propped, some restored, some still lived in.