İç Kale Masjid

Ic Kale Masjid stands inside the inner citadel of Erzurum Castle, built directly against a semicircular bastion on its southern wall. Historians attribute its construction to the Saltuk emir Ebu'l-Muzaffer, placing it in the final decade of the twelfth century, which would make it one of the earliest surviving Turkish-Islamic structures within the fortress. The prayer hall is a simple rectangular room, roughly 14.7 by 10.6 meters, built of cut stone with its entrance on the north side flanked by two windows; the bastion itself was adapted to serve as the mihrab niche. In the citadel's southwest corner stands a slender cylindrical brick minaret on a stone base, popularly known as the Tray Minaret, which may have doubled as a lookout tower and carries a Kufic inscription naming the Saltuk emir. During the nineteenth century the minaret was repurposed as a clock tower and given a baroque gallery.