İhsaniye Mosque

İhsaniye Mosque was built in Antakya toward the end of the sixteenth century, during the Ottoman period, as a single-domed neighbourhood mosque fronted by a covered porch carried on three arches, the traditional son cemaat yeri where latecomers could pray. Its courtyard held a small cemetery, and the building was known for the carved decoration on its columns and capitals and for inscriptions set above its courtyard gate, its southern facade and its entrance portico, along with a decorated mihrab and minber inside. For centuries it served as one of the recognizable historic mosques of old Antakya. The mosque was completely destroyed in the earthquakes of 6 February 2023, which reduced its columns, inscriptions and carved prayer-niche decoration to rubble. Archaeologists and art historians, working through Turkey's disaster-zone excavation unit, have since been recovering surviving architectural fragments from the debris as part of an effort to document and eventually restore the four-century-old structure.