Where the Void Touches the City: Subtraction and the Sacred at the Edge of Istanbul

Simal Zagra (Şimal Zağra)

There is a moment, just before arrival, when Sancaklar Mosque is entirely invisible. The sunflower fields thin out. The hum of construction trucks grows louder. Then, a sharp-edged minaret (and nothing more) breaks the horizon. Everything else sinks. Following the slope; downwards instead of upwards. The city has vanished, but something else begins.

On the western fringe of Istanbul, between the industrial edges of Büyükçekmece and the rural thresholds of Karaağaç Village, Sancaklar Mosque appears both as a presence and a profound absence. Designed by Emre Arolat in 2012, the mosque is carved into the earth, barely distinguishable from its surrounding except for its minaret. Its subterranean, excavated architecture challenges the visual grammar of mosque design in Turkey, where state-sanctioned Islam is often monumentalized in domes, minarets, and symmetrical façades. But more than that, Sancaklar Mosque disrupts[1] urban and religious expectations by materializing presence through absence. In doing so, it invites a new way of thinking about not only sacred space at the edge of urban life, but also the co-production of sacred space and urbanity through subtraction instead of domination.

Urban Thresholds and Sacred Experiments

Sancaklar’s location is neither urban core nor rural mosque; but somewhere in between. This in-betweenness is not just geographic, but conceptual. The mosque occupies a liminal space where infrastructure, agriculture, gated suburban villas, and wild vegetations jostle for dominance. I encounter sunflower fields and construction debris, stone paths and scaffolding, all within a few minutes of driving.

Such edge zones are crucial for rethinking urbanity. As AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) argues, cities are shaped not just through formal planning and infrastructure, but also through informal, experimental formations—spaces where people, objects, and institutions interact in unexpected ways. Sancaklar participates in such a dynamic: It is not placed into the city; it is co-constructed with urban becoming. The mosque is not simply reacting to urban sprawl—it folds itself into it. Further, as we are reminded by scholars, urbanity is not a fixed form; it is a historically situated, open-ended process (Berking & Löw 2008; Haferburg & Rothfuss 2019). It is made through practices, not merely by plans or buildings.

Susanne Rau (2023) reinforces this point by seeing urbanity not as a stable container, but as a practice; always co-produced, relational, and unfinished. Following, urban religion is not confined to historic mosques or institutions, but emerges through interactions with public space, infrastructure, and sensory worlds (Knott, Krech & Meyer 2016). Sancaklar’s placement in the city’s shifting margin makes it a case study in how the sacred is formed not in opposition to urban modernity, but is very much entangled with its material flows and spatial mutations.

Subtraction, Sacred Formation, and Material Religion

Rather than occupying space in the city, Sancaklar seems to withdraw from it. Its architectural language refuses monumentalism. There is no dome, no cascading arches, no tiled ornament except for the minaret standing out. Instead, the mosque descends into the terrain. The structure disappears as one walks down the carved stone path; light dims, ornament vanishes. And yet, what might appear as emptiness becomes a powerful medium for religious presence.

In the language of material religion (see Meyer et al. 2010), Sancaklar functions not as a symbolic representation of Islam, but as a formation; a constellation of materials, bodies, and sensory cues that orient religious perception. It is not simply a building in which religion is practiced; it teaches the body how to sense the divine. Webb Keane (2008) emphasizes that religious presence emerges through the material mediation of the senses—not just through symbols or texts, but through sounds, textures, shadows, and spaces. Sancaklar’s architecture of subtraction removes visual and auditory excess, and in doing so, intensifies attention. Stillness becomes a form of saturation.

This is not absence-as-lack, but absence-as-form. It resonates with the Islamic theological concept of tanzih (the radical incomparability of God) and with a tradition of aniconism in Islamic aesthetics (Shaw 2019). The sacred cannot be represented, but it can be sensed—and that sensing requires veiling, concealment, and silence. The void is not empty; it is full of potential perception.

Sancaklar embodies this principle directly: As one walks down the stairs, the sensory world contracts. Light is dimmed. Sound is muffled. The roughness of stone underfoot and the coolness of the air sharpen the perception. In the absence of visual distractions, the body becomes an antenna. Here, there is a mode of perception that emerges through the encounter between built form and embodied attention.

In this way, the mosque ‘performs’ what Birgit Meyer (2009) calls aesthetic formations: spatial and sensory configurations that shape how the divine is felt. The building disciplines not just prayer, but perception itself. It trains the worshipper to see less, to feel more, to descent inward. The mosque is not a static object; it is a religious actor, producing subjectivity through its very structure.

Religion and the Urban Otherwise

Sancaklar’s refusal to perform the dominant Islamic visual identity of İstanbul through architectural visibility and the current trends in Turkish mosque design deserve further notice. As Uğur Tanyeli (2014) notes, contemporary mosque projects often function as ideological symbols—enmeshed in state politics, populist aesthetics, and neoliberal urban transformation. In these cases, urban religion becomes something that is imposed on the city: built upward, made visible, and aligned with national narratives of Islamic modernity. For instance, mega-projects like the Çamlıca Mosque, perched prominently on the Istanbul skyline, seek to monumentalize Islam through symbolic repetition—gigantic domes, classical arches, nationalist mosaics—using sacred space to perform state-sanctioned identity and urban dominance.

Sancaklar resists this particular grammar and offers religion otherwise; a sacred formation that detaches itself from the monumental aesthetics of power.[2] Its ethical commitment is not to visibility but to humility (tawazu), a value repeated by the architect in interviews (Arolat 2014; 2018; 2021). By carving out a subterranean mosque that invites introspection rather than spectacle, Sancaklar’s shift from representation to sensory enactment aligns with broader calls in religious studies to foreground lived religion[3]— embodied, affective, and situated. In this case, religion is not preserved or inscribed; it is materially performed and felt through space, darkness, and movement.

Descent, (dis)Orientation, and the Inverted Axis

Descent plays a central role in the phenomenology of Sancaklar. Unlike most mosques, which elevate worshippers through domes, height, and vertical light, Sancaklar moves them downward; into the soil, into dimness, into enclosure. This movement inverts a long religious tradition of vertical transcendence. In many cosmologies, including Islamic and Christian ones, the vertical axis (axis mundi) connects the earthly to the divine. Mosques traditionally echo this verticality in their architecture, aspiring toward heaven.

But Sancaklar reverses this motion. The divine is not above, it is within. Here, to go downward is not to lose God, but to be stripped enough to sense God. Drawing on phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1982; Desjarlais & Throop 2011), this spatial movement produces a training of perception. The gaze slows, the body bends, the light veils. In Islamic epistemology, such experiences align with the role of khayal, imagination—not as fantasy, but as the faculty that perceives the unseen through partial disclosure (Chittick 1989; Ogunnaike 2017). Here, imagination is not cognitive embellishment, but an ontological bridge between material and immaterial. Further, architecturally, the descent prepares the body. It breaks orientation. It slows motion. It creates a liminal space of barzakh; the in-between realm mentioned in the Qur’an that separates yet connects two states. The visitor enters a zone between light and dark, interior and exterior, material and immaterial.

Womb, Mercy, and the Feminine Void

At the base of the prayer space, the ceiling opens into undulating curves. The structure, while brutalist in material, feels soft in form. The geometry invokes a womb for me. In Arabic, the word rah (womb) shares a trilateral root (R-H-M) with rahma (mercy) and thereby ar-Rahman (the Merciful), one of the ninety-nine names of God. The sacred is not paternal or towering; it is maternal and enveloping. This is no metaphor for metaphor’s sake: The void becomes maternal; the absence becomes embrace. The architectural form performs divine compassion not through image, but through felt form.

This architectural allegory reconfigures divine space. The mosque becomes not a fortress of identity but a cavity of compassion. As its architect has noted, the goal was not just to build a prayer hall, but to “give back to the land” and create a space of shelter. Through this inversion of the dome into a wombed void; the mosque gestures toward presence without displaying it. It touches rather than tells.

Conclusion: Excavating the Urban Sacred

Sancaklar Mosque compels us to rethink both urbanity and religion. It shows that sacred presence need not be asserted through visibility, dominance, or symbolic repetition. Instead, presence can be formed through absence, experienced through withdrawal and descent, and co-produced through the unfinished and alive spaces of urban life.

In the language of the “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” project, Sancaklar is not an object ‘within’ urbanity; it is an agent of urban co-production. It reshapes how the sacred can be sensed in the city; not as a monument but as a phenomenological encounter. It is built not at the center, but at the margin. Not above the land, but in it. Not toward heaven, but toward humility and introspection.

Note: All pictures are taken by the author (2021).

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[1] Throughout this text, agency is frequently ascribed to the mosque (e.g., “Sancaklar disrupts,” “the mosque performs,” or “the mosque refuses”) rather than to its architect, Emre Arolat. This choice is deliberate and rooted in the theoretical framework of new materialism, foregrounding the relational agency of non-human actors in shaping human experience. Rather than viewing the mosque as a passive object designed by a human subject, this perspective treats it as an active religious agent that co-produces perception, subjectivity, and meaning through its form, materiality, spatiality, and affective atmosphere. The goal is to shift attention away from authorial intent and toward what the architecture does: How it mediates the sacred, disciplines the body, and reconfigures urban religious experience.

[2] Briefly, while this sentence attributes a resistant, counter-monumental logic to the Sancaklar Mosque, it is important to note that Emre Arolat, as a prominent and internationally recognized architect, is deeply embedded in both Turkish and global architectural institutions. His broader portfolio includes luxury hotels, commercial spaces, and state-supported projects, which complicates any straightforward reading of him as politically oppositional. Thus, the mosque’s apparent resistance must be understood less as the product of an individual’s political stance and more as a situational exception; a moment where architectural form, material aesthetics, and topographical embeddedness coalesce to produce a sacred atmosphere that exceeds or perhaps even escapes the authorial intentions of its designer. This interpretive move also aligns with the methodological focus of this article: to center the material and spatial agency of the mosque rather than valorizing the architect as a singular creative or political figure.

[3]  For more, see Ammerman 2007; Hall 1998; McGuire 2008; Orsi 2005; Desing et al. 2013.

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