Gaziantep Ağa Mosque

The Ağa Mosque is one of Gaziantep's mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman mosques, its prayer hall measuring roughly 11.8 by 23 metres, a scale typical of the city's larger neighbourhood mosques of that period. Architectural surveys of Gaziantep's historic mosques cite the Ağa Mosque as an example of how the city's builders adapted a compact, single-volume prayer hall to hold the mihrab, minber and women's gallery within a relatively modest footprint, a layout shared with several of the city's other Ottoman-era foundations. The mosque takes its name, like many others across Ottoman Anatolia, from the title ağa borne by its original patron rather than from a personal name that survives in local memory. It continues to function as an active place of worship in Gaziantep today, standing among the dense concentration of historic mosques that mark the city's old commercial and residential core.