AntalyaTurkey 36° N · 30° E Updated Apr 2026
Antalya's 38m fluted minaret is the city's football badge and civic soul — built 1230, it outlasted its own prayer hall by a century before a new one rose beneath it.
Photo: Paul VanDerWerf from Brunswick, Maine, USA · CC BY 2.0
Ninety steps spiral inside the fluted minaret of Antalya Mosque — not the 99 that would match the names of Allah, and nobody has ever explained the missing nine. The 38-meter tower has stood in Antalya, Turkey since the 1220s, outliving the sultan who built it, a 12-year Crusader occupation, and the original prayer hall it was meant to call worshippers to. Climb Kaleiçi's cobblestones, look up, and you're reading eight centuries of turquoise brick.
Locals call it Yivli Minare Camii — the Fluted Minaret Mosque. The minaret is the oldest thing standing: red brick shaft, eight semi-circular grooves running its full height, fragments of cobalt and turquoise glazed tile still clinging between the courses like the last scales of a drained pool.
The prayer hall beside it is younger than it looks. Six low domes in two rows, twelve columns propped up on reused Roman and Byzantine capitals, an Arabic inscription plaque dated 774 A.H. The minaret is Seljuk. The hall around it is a victory monument, rebuilt after Antalya was taken back from Christian occupiers.
Come at the late afternoon call to prayer. Light slides down the flutes, the grooves catch shadow in eight vertical stripes, and the whole tower looks briefly like it's moving. Shoes off at the door, women's scarf at the entrance, five minutes of quiet inside — that's all it asks.
Count the grooves. Eight semi-circular flutes run the full 38 metres of red baked brick, and no other minaret in Anatolia wears this ribbing — it's the reason the whole complex took its name (yivli means fluted). The square stone base stands 6.5 metres tall and 5.5 metres wide, roughly the footprint of a small studio apartment, before the brick shaft takes over and the geometry gets strange.
Look closer on the eastern and western faces. Fragments of turquoise and cobalt-blue glaze still cling between brick courses, remnants of a tile skin that once wrapped the whole tower — a Seljuk instinct to dress engineering in jewellery. At golden hour, around 16:00 to 18:00, what survives lights up like chipped sapphire.
The 90 steps inside spiral tight and dim to a balcony that opens onto Kaleiçi's rooftops, the marina, and the Taurus Mountains beyond. Climb it last. Everything you've just seen at ground level rearranges itself from up there.
Step inside and look up first, then down. Six domes in two rows of three sit on twelve columns, and this is the oldest surviving multi-domed mosque in Anatolia — rebuilt in 1373 by Mehmet Bey of the Hamidids, an inscription plaque dates it precisely to 774 A.H. The interior is intentionally spare. Seljuk restraint, not neglect.
The columns are the tell. Run your eye along the capitals and you'll spot Corinthian curls and Byzantine volutes — spolia lifted from the 5th-century church that stood here before 1230, reused without apology. Thicknesses vary deliberately; what looks sloppy is structural. Stone stays cool to the touch year-round, a 10-degree drop from the July street outside.
Now the floor. Near the centre, a glass panel reveals 800-year-old water channels running beneath — medieval passive cooling that most visitors stride straight over. Ask staff; they'll happily point it out if you linger.
Cross the threshold into the madrasa courtyard and the acoustic changes before you do. Built in 1239 by Atabeg Ataman during the reign of Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev II, the four-iwan school sits behind a grand Seljuk portal now flanked — absurdly, brilliantly — by souvenir shops selling evil eyes and fridge magnets. Stand in the north iwan and clap once. The echo is cleaner than anything the prayer hall returns.
Two domed tombs anchor the complex: the Zincirkıran türbesi and Nigar Hatun's smaller mausoleum, plus a former Mevlevi lodge where whirling dervishes once turned. Around 2020 restoration work unearthed 40 graves beneath the grounds — the dead still surface here.
Finish at Keçili Park cliff terrace five minutes downhill, where the minaret, the harbour, and the Mediterranean stack into one frame. Then, if you've got daylight left, the Düden Waterfalls are twenty minutes east.
History
Records show Sultan Alaaddin Keykubad I ordered the minaret around 1230, shortly after the Seljuks took Antalya from its Byzantine rulers. The mosque rose on the foundations of a Byzantine church whose dedication no source now remembers — sacred ground reclaimed in stone and glazed tile, visible from ships miles offshore.
The original prayer hall didn't survive the 14th century. Scholars cannot agree on what destroyed it — earthquake, fire, or siege damage — only that by the 1370s the minaret stood alone. What rose around it afterward was not a restoration. It was a reconquest in masonry.
The turning point
On August 24, 1361, a fleet of 120 Cypriot ships anchored off Antalya. King Peter I of Cyprus took the city in a Crusader lightning strike and held it for twelve years. Sources don't record what happened to the mosque during the Lusignan occupation — whether it was closed, converted, or simply abandoned — only that Muslim merchants were pushed from the port and the azaan went quiet above Kaleiçi.
The man who got it back was Mubariz al-Din Mehmed Bey, a local Hamidid emir history remembers by the epithet Zincirkıran — Chain-Breaker. In 1373 he drove the Lusignan garrison out. That same year, not one season later, he rebuilt the destroyed prayer hall in six domes around the surviving Seljuk minaret. A six-line Arabic inscription above the west entrance names him as patron and dates the work to 774 A.H.
His mausoleum still stands a few steps from the mosque. Most visitors photograph the fluted tower and walk straight past the plaque that explains why the hall beneath it exists — a post-Crusader reconstruction dressed as continuity, built fast and built to stay.
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Yes — it's Antalya's civic symbol and the oldest surviving multi-domed mosque in Anatolia. The 38m fluted red-brick minaret from around 1230 is on the Antalyaspor football badge and appears on most city branding. Entry is free and it sits at the gateway to Kaleiçi old town, so you pass it anyway.
Plan 20–30 minutes for the mosque and courtyard, or 45–60 minutes if you include the adjacent Mevlevihane Museum and former madrasa (now a State Fine Arts Gallery). A quick exterior photo stop takes 10–15 minutes. Combined with a Kaleiçi stroll down to Hadrian's Gate and the marina, budget 2–3 hours.
Take the Antray tram from the airport and get off at İsmetpaşa stop, then walk 10 minutes — about 40 minutes total. HAVAŞ airport buses drop at the city centre, from where it's a short taxi or walk into Kaleiçi. The mosque sits beside Kalekapısı (Clock Tower) Square on Cumhuriyet Caddesi.
Yes — entry to the mosque, the courtyard, and the adjacent Mevlevihane Museum is free, with no ticketing system or online booking. Donations are appreciated but not expected. The Mevlevihane is closed Mondays and otherwise open Tue–Sun 08:30–17:30.
Early morning around sunrise — the red brick minaret glows, the square is quiet, and you avoid prayer-time closures. Golden hour between 16:00 and 18:00 gives the best light on the surviving turquoise and cobalt tile fragments. Spring (April–June) and autumn (September–November) are ideal; avoid Friday midday prayers (11:30–13:30).
Look down, not just up — a glass floor panel in the prayer hall reveals 800-year-old water channels that most visitors walk straight over. Read the 1373 Arabic inscription plaque naming Mehmed Bey, proof the hall is a post-Crusader rebuild rather than Seljuk original. Climb the 90 steps inside the minaret for a 360° view over the harbour, Taurus Mountains, and Mediterranean.
Shoulders and knees covered for everyone, plus a headscarf for women — scarves are usually available at the entrance. Remove shoes before entering the prayer hall, and no shorts or sleeveless tops. It's an active neighbourhood mosque, so keep voices low and step out during the five daily prayers.
"Yivli" means "fluted" in Turkish, referring to the eight semi-circular vertical grooves running the full 38m height of the red-brick shaft. The design is rare in Anatolian Seljuk architecture and still shows fragments of the original turquoise and cobalt-blue glazed tiles. Locals also call it Alaaddin Camii after Sultan Alaaddin Keykubad I, who commissioned it around 1230.
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