The name is a punchline that hides a moral: Sanki Yedim, 'It is as if I ate.' Every time the man who would found this mosque wanted to buy a sweet or a delicacy, he stopped himself. He set the money aside instead. And each time he did it, he told himself: sanki yedim. As if I had eaten. The satisfaction was imagined; the coin was real. Over years — nobody recorded exactly how many — the coins accumulated into enough to build a mosque in the Zeyrek neighborhood of Fatih. Istanbul has mosques founded by sultans and grand viziers, by generals and wealthy merchants. This one was founded by a frugal man whose name may have been Keçeci Hayreddin, or Sankiyedim, or something else entirely. What the neighborhood remembers is the story of the treats he never ate.
The mosque is formally recorded under several names: the Mehmed Şakir Efendi Mescit, the Keçeci Hayreddin Mescit, the Sancaktar Hayreddin Mescit. Mescit is the Turkish word for a small mosque, a neighborhood prayer space rather than a grand congregational building. But none of those official designations stuck the way Sanki Yedim did. The popular name outlasted the formal ones because it carries a story in three words. In a city where mosques are numbered in the thousands and most bear the name of a patron or a sultan, this one is named for a habit of mind — for the particular discipline of denying yourself something small in service of something larger. That is unusual enough to be remembered.
The original mosque was probably built in the eighteenth century, though the records are uncertain about both the date and the founder's precise identity. At some point it was rebuilt by Adanalı Mehmet Şakir Ağa, and at some later point it burned. Fire was a constant hazard in Ottoman Istanbul, where wooden construction dominated and neighborhoods were packed tightly together. The mosque was rebuilt by İmamzâde Hasan Efendi and reopened in 1868. Then, in 1908, the Çırçır fire swept through the district and destroyed it again. The building was rebuilt a final time between 1959 and 1961 by the Türkiye Anıtlar Derneği, the Society for the Preservation of Turkish Monuments. Each rebuilding erased more of whatever architectural character the original may have had.
The current Sanki Yedim Mosque is, by the account of those who have described it, architecturally undistinguished — squeezed between apartment buildings and built of reinforced concrete, looking much like the mid-twentieth-century reconstruction it is. There is nothing in its walls that tells the story of the coins saved and the sweets refused. A visitor who did not already know the name might walk past without slowing. But the Zeyrek neighborhood, where the mosque sits, is itself a layered place on the third hill of Istanbul's historic peninsula, a short walk from the Süleymaniye Mosque and not far from the converted Byzantine church of Christ Pantocrator. In that company, even a modest concrete building can carry a story worth knowing.
Istanbul's mosques were built by people with power — by those who could command labor, appropriate land, and commission the finest Ottoman architects of their era. The Şakirin, the Blue Mosque, the Süleymaniye: these are monuments to wealth and authority. The Sanki Yedim Mosque is a monument to something quieter. Its founder, whoever he was, could not afford to simply build a mosque. He had to save for it, one denied pleasure at a time. There is a particular Istanbul character to this — a city of small economies and large ambitions, where neighborhood institutions were built not just by the powerful but by the persistent. The mosque burned twice and was rebuilt twice. The story of how it was first funded survived all of it.
The Sanki Yedim Mosque is located at 41.01869°N, 28.95319°E in the Zeyrek neighborhood of Fatih, on Istanbul's European historic peninsula. From the air at 3,000–5,000 feet, Zeyrek sits on the third hill of the old city; the Süleymaniye Mosque's four minarets are a navigation landmark roughly 500 meters to the southeast, and the Golden Horn waterway is visible to the north. Nearest airport: LTFM (Istanbul Airport), approximately 20 km to the northwest.