With its uneven terrain, Turkey's Black Sea region often forces its residents to come up with creative architectural solutions. It is not always the terrain though that propels the imagination of designers of buildings in the sparsely populated regions dotted with mountains running along the coast. For the builders of a mosque in the town of Eynesil in Giresun province, the search for a symbol for their town resulted in the minaret of the new mosque being designed to resemble a samovar.
Giresun is not particularly known as “tea hub” of Turkey. That honor belongs to Rize, another Black Sea province where tea production is the main business. Yet, the town of Eynesil in the province, otherwise known for its tasty nut exports, takes pride in five tea factories and the residents’ devotion to this nationwide Turkish habit.
With this in mind, a group of philanthropists in the quaint town on the Black Sea coast set out to build a mosque back in 1987. Construction relied on donations and took 35 years due to exquisite designer touches adorning the mosque. A unique cream-colored minaret that can be distinguished from others since it is shaped like a samovar, however, already draws visitors.
The “Green Mosque” is surrounded by a lush landscape occasionally broken by a building here and there, but it is its odd minaret that took more than four years to construct, far longer than traditional minarets adorning the country's mosques, that stands out. The mosque is now partially open to worship as workers continue to put the final touches on the exterior.
Ayhan Tufanoğlu, head of the association established for the construction of the mosque, told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Sunday that they sought to build a mosque that would “deserve praise for its beauty as our ancestors did.” Tufanoğlu, who also worked as a construction worker at the mosque, said they worked on fine details of each stone block making up the mosque. “For the minaret, we brought different colored stones from different places. Green stones are hauled in from the nearby town of Ören. Yellow stones are brought from Bayburt province and red stones are collected from Kürtün Stream,” he says.
“Eynesil is famous for its tea and we wanted to make it more known, to represent it in our mosque. Samovar is also a symbol of unity, bringing together a large number of people to drink tea, like people coming together in congregation for prayers at the mosque,” he added.
