Istanbul home to most mosques in Turkey

KAYSERİ – Doğan News Agency

Sultanahmet Mosque, İstanbul. Hürriyet photo.

Turkey has 82,693 mosques, the most of which are in the country’s largest city, Istanbul, according to Religious Affairs Directorate data.

Istanbul has 3,113 mosques, including the historical Sultanahmet Mosque and the Süleymaniye Mosque. The eastern province of Tunceli, which has the highest proportion of Alevi citizens of any province, has the fewest mosques at 117, although it is also the second smallest province by total population.

There has been an increase in the number of mosques in Turkey in the past decade, data shows. In the past 10 years, the number of mosques in Turkey increased from 75,369 to 82,693, said the data.

Turkey’s population was 75,627,384 as of Dec. 31, 2012, according to the Turkish Statistics Institute’s (TÜİK) data.

The Central Anatolian province of Konya, long seen as a bastion of conservatism, followed Istanbul with 3,046 mosques, despite being just the seventh-most populous province in Turkey with close to 1.1 million people. Ankara has 2,817 mosques, while the Black Sea province of Samsun has 2,621 mosques.

Moving down the list, Kastamonu has 2,547 Muslim houses of worship, Antalya has 2,097, Trabzon 1,917, İzmir 1,782, Diyarbakır 1,766, Bursa 1,646, Şanlıurfa 1,614, Mersin 1,447, Giresun 1,425, Sivas 1,317, Van 1,294 and Kayseri 1,217.