Meydan Mosque, Hatay

Meydan Mosque, also known locally as Hatuniye Camii, stands in the Meydan quarter of central Antakya and was originally the heart of a larger religious and charitable complex. According to the inscription above its entrance gate, it was built in 890 AH, corresponding to 1485, on the order of Gülbahar Hatun, mother of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, and its endowment deed, preserved at the General Directorate of Foundations, is dated 898 AH, or 1492. The original complex paired the mosque with a madrasa and a public soup kitchen, but neither building survives intact: the madrasa has disappeared entirely and the soup kitchen remains only as ruins. The mosque itself endured for more than five centuries as one of Antakya's principal late-fifteenth-century Ottoman monuments, a rare survival from the royal women's patronage that shaped the city's early Ottoman-period skyline.