Türbe of Sultan Ahmed I

Ahmed I was born in Manisa on 28 April 1590 and came to the throne on the death of his father, Mehmed III, on 22 December 1603³. His great foundation in Istanbul was the Sultan Ahmed complex on the edge of the Hippodrome (At Meydanı), built between 1609 and 1620 by the chief architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa^2,7,8. TDV relates that the sultan himself worked with a golden pickaxe when the mosque's foundations were laid³. The mosque opened for worship in 1616, and the complex also had a madrasa, a primary school, a hospital, a public kitchen (imaret), shops, fountains, a Qur'an school (darülkurra) and the tomb². Ahmed I died on 22 November 1617, after a stomach illness of fifty-one days³.

The tomb was begun after his death and completed in 1619 by his son Osman II². Osman II was himself murdered at Yedikule in May 1622; his body was brought in secret to Topkapı Palace and, after a funeral prayer the next morning, buried in his father's tomb⁴. Murad IV, Ahmed I's son by Kösem Sultan, died on 8 February 1640, and his coffin was carried to the tomb in a large procession, with the three horses he had ridden on campaign, saddled backwards, led before the coffin⁵. Kösem Sultan was killed in the palace harem in September 1651 and buried beside her husband⁶. TDV counts 36 cenotaphs in the tomb².

The tomb and the darülkurra share a walled enclosure at the north-east corner of the complex, facing the Hippodrome². The tomb is a square building with slightly chamfered corners, roofed by a large dome on squinches, with a portico of three bays in front². Opposite the door an eyvan (a vaulted recess) projects towards the darülkurra, a square domed building whose east wall has a large arched opening placed to give a view of the tomb, and of Ahmed I's cenotaph in particular². The outer walls are faced with marble and divided by mouldings².

The door has a shell-shaped hood with an inscription above it, and its leaves are faced with ebony and inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl and silver; the ceiling of the doorway carries a dense floral design on marble². Two windows in the enclosure wall, one towards the Hippodrome and one towards the madrasa, were made as sebils (water dispensers) and were probably finished with the tomb in 1619². A third sebil, at the corner facing the Hippodrome, was replaced in the mid-19th century by a timekeeper's room (muvakkithane)².

Inside, the walls between the windows of the lower row are faced with underglaze Iznik tiles with floral designs, and a band of tile inscriptions runs around the room above them². The window recesses have tiles of other colours and arrangements². From the upper row of windows to the top of the dome the decoration is painted (kalem işi), and TDV notes that its zigzag pattern recalls the covers of the Kaaba². The 36 cenotaphs include those of Ahmed I, Kösem Sultan, Osman II and Murad IV, among other members of the dynasty^2,8. The eyvan opposite the entrance reaches towards the darülkurra, which TDV recorded in 2009 as a store of the Istanbul Tombs Museum Directorate².