Qualla: Muradiye Mosque, Edirne

Muradiye Mosque, Edirne: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit "Yahia", CC BY-SA 4.0. Eight rows of cobalt blue hexagonal tiles, set on their points, wrap three walls of the prayer hall. Before the theft of 2001, there were 479 of them, in 53 different patterns, arranged with no obvious order: most designs appearing two or three times, the most common one repeated 54 times, fifteen patterns appearing exactly once. The disorder was deliberate, or at least it was original. It was also the first time anyone in the Ottoman Empire had produced underglaze painted tiles, and the small Muradiye Mosque in Edirne is where they ended up.

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Image: "Yahia" | CC BY-SA 4.0

Muradiye Mosque, Edirne: A Sultan's Side Project

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R Prazeres, CC BY-SA 4.0. Murad II commissioned the mosque, which was completed in 1435 or 1436 during his long reign over the early Ottoman state. He was the father of Mehmed the Conqueror, the sultan who would take Constantinople in 1453, but his own court remained in Edirne, the empire's European capit...

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Image: R Prazeres | CC BY-SA 4.0

Muradiye Mosque, Edirne: The Frieze

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nevit Dilmen, CC BY-SA 3.0. The blue-and-white hexagonal tiles measure 22.5 centimeters across. Each one has a creamy white fritware body, a kind of ceramic made from a glassy frit rather than ordinary clay, with cobalt blue designs painted under a clear transparent glaze. The patterns drew directly on Chin...

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Image: Nevit Dilmen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Muradiye Mosque, Edirne: Masters of Tabriz

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0. The mihrab, the niche indicating the direction of Mecca, is unusually large for so small a building. It is built of moulded polychrome tiles in a technique called cuerda seca, dry cord, in which lines of greasy black resist separate areas of different colored glaze. The colors in...

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Image: Dosseman | CC BY-SA 4.0

Muradiye Mosque, Edirne: The Misplaced Walls

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Nyča, CC BY-SA 4.0. The art historian John Carswell noticed something strange about the mosque. The painted decoration on the walls above the tile frieze runs behind the tiles rather than around them, suggesting the tiles were installed after the walls had been painted at least twice. The hexagonal ...

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Image: Julian Nyča | CC BY-SA 4.0