Alâeddin Mosque

The Alâeddin Mosque stands atop the Alâeddin Hill in the centre of Konya, an artificially raised mound that served as the acropolis of ancient Iconium long before the Seljuks arrived. Completed in 1235 under Rum Seljuk Sultan Alâeddin Keykubad I, it is one of the oldest surviving Seljuk mosques in Anatolia and functioned simultaneously as a dynastic mausoleum, housing the tombs of several Rum Seljuk sultans within its precinct. The site layers roughly two millennia of occupation: Hellenistic acropolis, Byzantine stronghold, and finally a Seljuk külliye that once included a now-vanished royal palace to the north. A Byzantine church converted into the Eflatun Mescid stood at the hill's edge until the 1920s, a physical trace of the city's shifting religious fabric. From the hill's plateau, visitors look out over Konya's rooftops in one of the few elevated vantage points the city offers.