Çıkrık Village Mosque

MerkezHistoric BuildingsHistoric BuildingsMosqueNovember 2026

The Çıkrık Village Mosque stands in the centre of Çıkrık, a village in the central district (Merkez) of Çorum. According to Çiğdem Karaçay’s 2024 article, the village is 45 km from the city of Çorum; it belonged to the Mecitözü district until the 1990s and was then attached to the central district. The mosque is owned by the village’s legal entity. The same author’s 2021 article describes it as lying 12 km from the Doğla Village Mosque in Mecitözü.

Date

The mosque has no foundation inscription, so it is not known when or by whom it was built. Karaçay’s archival research found two documents on the building:

• A record of the appointment of a preacher and imam dated AH 1259 / AD 1843 in the foundation records archive of the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakıflar). It shows that the mosque existed in 1843.
• A document in the Ottoman Archives dated AH 1309 / AD 1891-92 on the inspection carried out because the mosque and the school (mektep) in the village of Çıkrık, then in the Mecitözü district, needed repair.

The sign above the main entrance door reads 1904. The sources report this date in different ways. Karaçay’s 2021 article on the Doğla Mosque states, on the basis of the sign, that the mosque was built in 1904. Her 2024 article devoted to the Çıkrık Mosque, in the light of the 1843 and 1891-92 documents, says that 1904 must be the date of a thorough repair and adds that the mosque can be said to have been built in the first half of the 19th century. There are no documents on the repairs that the villagers carried out at various times to keep the building in use.

Architecture

Built on gently sloping ground, the mosque consists of a prayer hall (harim) extending east-west, with interior dimensions given in the article as about 14.43 x 10.20, a two-storey entrance section added later to its north façade, and a minaret at the north-west. There is no courtyard. The walls of the hipped-roof building are of cut stone, and the exterior is plain.

• Entrance section: The two-storey unit adjoining the main block is a rectangle running east-west, with eight windows in all on its two floors. Stairs in the west wing lead to the upper floor; a double-leaf door on the axis of the mihrab opens into the prayer hall.
• Minaret: Its date is unknown, but it appears to have been added later. A transition piece with edges chamfered in two triangles leads from the rectangular cut-stone base to the cylindrical shaft. It has a single balcony, and the cylindrical upper section is capped by a conical roof with a finial.
• Windows: The prayer hall is lit by 20 windows in two rows on the south, east and west façades: two above and two below on the west, three above and three below on the east, and six above and four below on the south. The upper windows are round-arched and the lower ones are upright rectangles. On the west façade, the door opened later to give access to the women’s gallery appears to have replaced a window.
• Covering: The hall is covered by a flat timber ceiling with a plastered and whitewashed bağdadi (lath-and-plaster) dome in the middle. The dome rests on two round wooden columns painted in oil paint on the south and on the columns carrying the gallery on the north. The walls are panelled in wood up to the level of the lower windows.
• Gallery: An L-shaped gallery (mahfil) on white-painted wooden columns runs along the north and west sides of the hall. Its lower storey on the north is divided into three parts: the central part, on the mihrab axis, gives access to the hall, the side parts are enclosed by railings, and part of the west wing is a glazed room for the mosque staff. A later repair separated the north gallery from the west gallery; the west gallery, set aside for women, is reached by stairs added in the north-west corner, next to the door of the minaret.
• Mihrab, pulpit and preaching chair: The mihrab, on the axis of the north entrance, has a semicircular niche under an eyebrow (ogee) arch, set in a rectangular frame and flanked by colonnettes with vase-shaped tops. A wooden preaching chair stands in the south-east corner and a wooden pulpit (minbar) in the south-west corner.

Painted and other decoration

The present painted decoration (kalem işi) in the hall was made in 2019 by the painter Nail Çalışkan and his team. According to Karaçay, the dome had been painted before; the old decoration was plastered over during repairs by the villagers, and the present motifs partly follow the original composition of the dome. The 2021 article notes that a new repertoire of ornament was used outside the dome. The compositions are built from motifs that Nail Çalışkan’s father, the calligrapher Murat Çalışkan, had made into templates on parchment, card or board, and according to the same article the name “Murat” is written in the mosque as that of the craftsman. There are no documents or photographs of the earlier decoration.

• Dome: The decoration is densest here. A lobed rosette sits at the centre; around it and around the base of the dome run rows of half-medallions (şemse) made of pointed and pendant elements, filled with rumi motifs, with five-petalled flowers (penç) in between. The colours are turquoise, shades of blue, red, yellow and white, and the same motifs appear on the north wall.
• Windows and borders: The upper windows are framed by a border of stylised flowers set alternately between pairs of stylised leaves; the lower windows are framed by stylised leaves. Below the dome, on the inner and outer faces of the arches and along the edge of the ceiling, panels on turquoise and white grounds alternate.
• Inscriptions: Medallions on either side of the stained-glass windows above the mihrab read “Allah” and “Muhammad”, and “Hu” is written on the west and east walls. Medallions in the pendentives bear the names Abu Bakr, Umar al-Faruq, Uthman and Ali, and medallions on the gallery level bear Hasan and Hussein.
• Timber ceiling: The flat timber ceiling in front of the mihrab, running east-west, is original. Thin laths (çıtakâri work) form a lozenge pattern, and a central rosette consists of two interlaced stars, one with six and one with four points, within a circle. The timber surfaces on the other three sides of the dome are undecorated.
• Stained glass: The stained glass of the upper windows shows petalled flowers, stylised tulips and leaves in blue, yellow, green, red, purple, pink and white. The outer grilles of these windows are moulded with lozenge motifs.
• Mihrab and pulpit: The fillet of the frame, the corner colonnettes, the arch and the surround of the niche of the otherwise plain mihrab are painted in gold-coloured oil paint, and the niche bears the words “Ya Vedud”. The two-sided wooden pulpit west of the mihrab has a door with a lobed arch and twisted corner colonnettes painted gold; its canopy on four columns is covered by a wooden cone, and its side face is decorated with gilt-painted triangles, squares, rectangles and hexagons. The preaching chair in the south-east corner is also picked out in gilt paint.

Regional context

Karaçay sees the painted decoration of the Çıkrık Mosque not so much as an artistic creation but as the 21st-century continuation of a tradition of decorating mosques that has existed in Çorum since the 18th century. As examples of this tradition the article cites the Çorum Grand Mosque and the Kulaksız Mosque, where original painted decoration was uncovered beneath plaster during restoration, and, in Mecitözü, the Elvan Çelebi Zaviye, the Alören Village Mosque and the Doğla Village Mosque. Karaçay also notes that in the old mosque of İbek, a village 4 km from Çıkrık, the carved motifs on the wooden column capitals carrying the gallery are picked out in blue paint, and suggests that these capitals may have been coloured when the mosque was once painted; she stresses that this is a hypothesis that only restoration work could clarify.

According to the article, stained glass in the upper windows is also an important decorative feature of the Abdülbaki Paşa, Çakır, Gülabi Bey, İnayetullah, Kale, Kellegöz, Kubbeli, Kulaksız and Kunduzhan mosques in central Çorum. The mihrab type with a semicircular niche under an eyebrow arch is called a “plain oyster shell” form in Abdulkadir Dündar’s Çorum Cami ve Mescitleri (Mosques and Masjids of Çorum, 2004) and is common in Çorum. Karaçay cites as examples the Üçköy Mosque, the Elvan Çelebi Zaviye, the Alören Village Mosque and, in central Çorum, the Abdülbaki Paşa (Velipaşa Mosque), Çakır, İnayetullah, Kellegöz, Kulaksız and Kunduzhan mosques. Those without a page of their own are described on the page on the registered wooden mosques of central Çorum.

Sources

• Çiğdem Karaçay, “Bir Devir Üslubunun Bir Bölge Karakterine Dönüşü: Çıkrık Camii Kalem İşi Süslemeleri” (From the Style of an Era to the Character of a Region: Çıkrık Mosque Hand-Drawn Decorations), Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 17/45, 2024, pp. 275-290. DOI: 10.12981/mahder.1372933. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/mahder/article/1372933
• Çiğdem Karaçay, “Gelenekçi Duvar Resminde Kültürel Kodların Çözümlenmesi: Doğla Camii Örneği” (Analysis of Cultural Codes in Traditional Wall Painting: The Doğla Mosque Example), Hitit İlahiyat Dergisi, 20/2, December 2021, pp. 589-622 (pp. 609-611). DOI: 10.14395/hid.952747. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/hid/article/952747