Mosque of Sultan Hassan Features:
Mosque of Sultan Hassan is One of the most interesting of the capital’s mosques, this is also Cairo’s finest example of early Mamluk architecture.
The Sultan Hassan mosque overlooks what were the fields of the Hippodrome (now Midan Salah ad-Din), across from the precipitous walls of the Citadel.
The dimensions of this massive structure are truly staggering: 150 m (492 ft) long, with walls 36 m (118 ft) high, the tallest minaret rising to 68 m (223 ft).
The construction of the Sultan Hassan Mosque was funded with money from the estates of people who had died in the Black Death (which struck Cairo in 1348).
This policy increased the unpopularity of the sultan, An-Nasr Hassan, who was already renowned for his greed. Building work began in 1356 and five years later, in 1361, one of the minarets collapsed, killing hundreds of people.
This turned out to be a bad omen: it was only a matter of time before the downfall of the sultan himself. By the end of 1361, two years before his mosque was completed, Hassan had been murdered.
Despite the unhappy history of Hassan’s grand monument, the interior of the mosque is overwhelming. Through a magnificent portal, a dimly lit corridor leads to a high-walled central courtyard.
On the four sides of the courtyard are great, recessed arches, known as iwans, which were formerly used for teaching. Each iwan was devoted to one of the main schools of Sunni Islam.
At the rear of the eastern iwan, situated to the right of a particularly beautiful mihrab or niche, a bronze door leads to the mausoleum. The largest in Cairo, it was never occupied by the sultan, a whose murdered body was not recovered.
However, the mausoleum was used for the burial of two of his sons.
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