Four-column mosque

Immediately to the south of the passage through the late Byzantine wall encircling Kaletepe (“castle hill,” often also referred to as “theater hill”) stands one of the many mosques of medieval Balat, which replaced the late Byzantine settlement of Palatia. Located on a small terrace on the slope between the theater fortress and the ancient city center, it is called the “4-column mosque” (“Vier-Säulen-Moschee”) in German literature. The building consists of a nearly square room whose interior spans around 12 x 12.4 meters. Not quite centrally inside the room, 4 columns built on repurposed plinths support the roof. The prayer niche (mihrab) was constructed from bricks in the southern wall of the mosque, not entirely perpendicular to it. Seen from the center of the 4 columns, its slight angle indicates the qibla (the direction of prayer towards Mecca, i.e., to the southeast) better than the wall itself does. The imprecise orientation of the building itself might indicate that it was repurposed from an earlier structure whose own walls, about one meter thick, had already been constructed from older, repurposed stones (spolia) themselves. Ottoman records from 1583 yield the name of the mosque: Hatib-i Cami-i Hisar, the Hisar Mosque (“fortress mosque”). Its establishment has been dated to the fourteenth century CE, i.e., the beginning of the Turkish emirate, when Balat was under the reign of the Menteşe Beylik.

Text: Lisa Steinmann