Karakaş Mosque (Antalya)

Karakaş Mosque, also historically known as the Cafer Ağa Mosque, traces its origin to a fourteenth-century building on Atatürk Boulevard in Antalya's Kaleiçi district. The old mosque had fallen into ruin by the late twentieth century, and between 1992 and 2003 it was entirely rebuilt by the Karakaş Mosque Construction and Preservation Association to a design by the noted Turkish architect Turgut Cansever, who kept the footprint of the demolished building while reinterpreting it through his idea of a modern vernacular architecture. Cansever built the new rectangular, domed mosque using the same colorful local stone and tilework traditionally seen in Kaleiçi's garden walls, and lined the inside of the dome, which rests on triangular pendentives, with monochrome glazed tiles. A single-balcony minaret rises at the northwest corner, making the building one of the most thoughtful examples of late twentieth-century mosque design in Turkey.