Molla Arap Mosque

This mosque in Bursa was built in the early sixteenth century by Mevlana Mehmed, better known by the nickname Molla Arap, whose grandfather Hamza belonged to a Turkish family originally from Khorasan. Molla Arap, whose given name was Muhyiddin Mehmed, took part in the Hungarian campaign under Suleiman the Magnificent before returning to Bursa, where he died in 1531 and was buried in the mosque's graveyard beneath a tomb enclosed by an iron fence opposite the building. Architecturally the mosque is unusual for Bursa in having a square prayer hall covered by nine domes set on hexagonal drums, making it one of the city's rare multi-domed mosques rather than the single-dome form typical of smaller neighborhood mosques. After sustaining damage in the major Bursa earthquake of 1855, part of the structure was restored under the governorship of the Ottoman statesman and scholar Ahmet Vefik Pasha.