The Ottoman period in Arta began in 1449, the same year the Ottomans took the nearby Byzantine stronghold of Rogoi, and the town eventually accumulated eight mosques. The Sultan Mehmed Mosque had an unusual origin story, recorded by the Metropolitan of Arta, Serafeim Xenopoulos. According to Xenopoulos, Sultan Mehmed II himself — the conqueror of Constantinople — heard of the Faik Pasha Mosque being built in Arta and wanted something larger dedicated to his own name. Work began. The sultan, however, was not satisfied with the result and ordered construction halted. The mosque was eventually completed by Suleyman Agha, a servant of Faik Pasha, and the building became known under both names: the Sultan Mehmed Mosque and the Suleyman Agha Mosque. The site chosen was deliberate: the highest point of the castle of Arta, from which the minaret would be visible across the surrounding plain. Locating Ottoman buildings at commanding positions was a recognised assertion of power over the town's Christian population, and the castle's summit was the most commanding position of all.

The mosque rose to two storeys with a brick-covered roof and a minaret decorated with coloured stones. Inside and close by, the castle complex included houses, a barracks, and prisons — the full apparatus of a garrison town. At the gate of the castle, an imaret operated: a charitable institution that provided free meals to the poor, a common feature of Ottoman urban life. The mosque itself drew income from agricultural lands around the villages of Vigla and Strongyli. And within its fabric, something older persisted: Xenopoulos noted that the mosque had been built directly on the foundations of an earlier Christian church, using its materials. Christian symbols could still be made out on the mosque's decorative plates, a kind of inadvertent palimpsest — the old faith legible beneath the new.

The mosque accumulated a small archive of images before it disappeared. The Ottoman cartographer and writer Piri Reis depicted Arta and its mosques in the 16th century. In 1686, the German engraver Jacob Enderlin produced an imaginative rendering of the town showing the castle mosque. Panagiotis Zographos, working in 1839 under the guidance of the Greek general Yannis Makriyannis, painted the siege of Arta during the Greek War of Independence — and the Sultan Mehmed, Sultan Bayazid, and Kiliç Bey mosques are all visible in the castle's shadow. Then came Lear in 1848–49 (whose drawings were published in 1851), and Edmund Evans, an English engraver who visited in April 1854, producing an image of the castle and its Ottoman clock tower. Each of these images now stands as evidence of a built landscape that no longer exists.

Arta joined the Kingdom of Greece on 24 July 1881, when Greek forces formally entered the town following the Convention of Constantinople signed on 2 July 1881. What followed was systematic. The new Greek administration undertook a deliberate reshaping of Arta's urban landscape, removing Ottoman-era elements from public view. Most mosques were simply left to decay after the Muslim population of Arta fled; but the Sultan Mehmed Mosque, because of its symbolic location inside the castle at the highest point of the town, was among the first to be actively targeted and destroyed. Only two of Arta's eight Ottoman mosques survive today: the Feyzullah Mosque and the Faik Pasha Mosque. The other six — including the building that Lear drew and Piri Reis recorded — are gone. The castle walls still stand, but the summit they protected now holds only sky where the minaret once rose.

The Sultan Mehmed Mosque's survival is archival rather than physical: in engravings, in the Metropolitan's notes, in the handful of 19th-century images produced by European travellers who passed through a town they found visually interesting. It is a reminder that Ottoman Arta was a living, layered place — not only a garrison but a community with charitable institutions, agricultural lands, and a built environment that expressed its own understanding of power and care. The castle of Arta is still there to visit, and from its walls you can look out across the same plain that the mosque's minaret once surveyed. The view is largely unchanged. The building that shaped it is not.