TITLE:
Wall Paintings of Giresun, Yağlidere, Tekke Village, Sari Halife (Haci Abdullah Halife) Mosque, Türkiye
AUTHORS:
Fatma Sedes
KEYWORDS:
Rural Mosques, Wall Paintings, Tekke Köy, Hacı Abdullah Halife
JOURNAL NAME:
Art and Design Review,
Vol.14 No.4,
October
19,
2026
ABSTRACT: The Hacı Abdullah Halife Mosque is located in Tekke Village, Yağlıdere District, Giresun, Türkiye. The present study documents the building and its wall paintings, evaluates its architectural fabric and later interventions, and reassesses its chronology and decorative attribution through measured survey, photographic documentation, documentary sources, and comparison with regional mosques. Field documentation and measured drawings were used to record the current condition; published historical and art-historical studies, the 1977 protection-board registration record, and the mosque’s survey, restitution, and restoration documentation were consulted to distinguish original fabric from later alterations. The mosque is a rectangular masonry building with a wooden ceiling, wooden mahfil and furnishings, and a later reinforced-concrete minaret. Comparison with selected nineteenth-century mosques in Giresun and the Eastern Black Sea region indicates that the present architectural form is most plausibly nineteenth-century, although this remains a typological assessment rather than a securely dated construction. The wall paintings, executed on dry plaster, include floral bouquets, trees, vases, lamps, clocks, architectural imagery, and a seven-tiered, eight-gated paradise depiction. A partially legible inscription naming “Darendeli Eş-Şeyh Hamza” supports, but does not by itself prove, the attribution of the paintings to Hacı Hamza. The study therefore treats both the building chronology and painter attribution as evidence-based but qualified conclusions.