Yakutiye Madrasa

Yakutiye Madrasa (Turkish: Yâkutiye Medresesi) is a historical 14th-century Madrasa in Erzurum, Turkey.^[1] The madrasa was built in 1310 by order of a local governor of the Ilkhanids, Hoca Yakut, and it is named after him.^[2]

Yakutiye Madrasa
Religion
Affiliation	Islam
District	Erzurum
Province	Erzurum
Region	Eastern Anatolia
Location
Location	Erzurum, Turkey
Architecture
Type	Madrasa
Style	Seljuk
Completed	1310
Minaret(s)	1

Building

It is a rectangular building with an inner courtyard, surrounded by the rooms for the students. It has a monumental portal decorated with stone carvings and one Minaret with geometrical decorations. There is also an adjoining Kümbet. Today the building is used as a museum dedicated to ethnography and Turkish and Islamic art.^[2]

Vault

Vault design of the Yakutiye Madrasa

The eastern view of Yakutiye Madrasa at sunset

The Yakutiye Madrasa mosque has a vault decorated with muqarna design and a central oculus, which was constructed in 1310 and ultimately derived from the vault of the Armenian gavit narthex.^[3]

Sources

1. Denknalbant, Ayşe (2013). "Yâkutiye Medresesi ve Kümbeti" [Yakutiye Madrasa and Kümbet]. Islam Ansiklopedisi (in Turkish). Vol. 43. Istanbul: Turkish Diyanet Foundation. pp. 293–295.
2. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Turkey: Turkey, Suzanne Swan, page 318, 2012
3. Eastmond, Antony (1 January 2017). Tamta's World: The Life and Encounters of a Medieval Noblewoman from the Middle East to Mongolia. Cambridge University Press. p. 297. doi:10.1017/9781316711774.011. The most obvious architectural form that was adopted in Armenian churches was the muqarnas vault. A fine example is the complex muqarnas that was used to build up the central vault of the zhamatun at Harichavank, which was added to the main church in the monastery by 1219. The origin of this type of vaulting clearly comes from Islamic sources, but it is used very differently here. There are no comparable examples in the Islamic world of using it to form complete vaults with an oculus in the centre. Throughout Anatolia in this period muqarnas were used to form niche heads. It was used for domes elsewhere in the Islamic world, as at Nur al-Din Zangi's 1174 hospital in Damascus, but conceived very differently: the monastic muqarnas are structurally pendentives, whereas the Damascus dome is a succession of stucco squinches. A generation later the Armenian use of muqarnas was re-imported into the Muslim world, and buildings such as the Yakutiye Madrasa in Erzurum (1310) copied the idea of a muqarnas vault around an oculus.

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