Erdoğan delivers message of unity at Ataşehir mosque opening

Erdoğan opened the Mimar Sinan Mosque, which has the capacity to host 10,000 worshippers, in the district of Ataşehir, located on the Asian side of the city.

“Loving each other is a requirement of our faith. We have to love each other. We cannot alienate each other. We will be in solidarity and unity, and Turkey will be a much different place in all aspects in the future,” Erdoğan said. The prime minister also noted that the mosque is the first on İstanbul's Asian side to have such a large capacity, and other facilities. He also expressed a wish for Ramadan to bring peace to the world.

Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba, Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz, EU Affiars Minister and Chief Negotiator Egemen Bağış and Education Minister Ömer Dinçer were in attendance at the opening.

The mosque is a complex with several other facilities located within it, including a conference hall, classrooms and a 270-vehicle capacity two-story parking lot. The Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning released a statement giving details about the mosque on Friday. “It [the mosque] is a mixture of today's construction technology and the Ottoman [architectural] style,” Minister Erdoğan Bayraktar was quoted as saying in the statement. An Ottoman measurement technique called “arşın” has been applied in the design and dimensions of the mosque, rather than the metric system, and traditional mosque construction methods have also been employed.

State-of-the-art steel and hydraulic slipform systems were utilized in the building of the mosque. The height of the main dome is 42 meters and its span is 27 meters. The mosque has four minarets, each at a height of 72 meters. The yard of the mosque is 6,500 square meters. Bayraktar said the mosque sits on 36,758 square meters of land.