Özet:

Büyükçekmece Bridge was built on Büyükçekmece Lake, which was a bay of the Marmara Sea in the past and later completed its formation in the form of a lagoon. The bridge, which is located at the first range after the capital Istanbul, is on the road route from the Ottoman Empire to Europe. The construction of the building started during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent and the works were completed in 1567/1568, in the first years of the reign of his successor, Selim II. The building, which was built by Mimar Sinan, who served as the chief architect for three sultans in the Ottoman Empire, is the only work that his name was written on the construction inscription. In this article, the traces of the repairs of the building, from the time the bridge was put into use to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, were investigated in the written archive documents. The main sources used in the study can be listed as follows: the bridge construction inscription giving information about the builder-architect-construction history of the bridge, what the architect of the bridge, Mimar Sinan, told about the bridge in his biographies and pamphlets, edicts, petitions, discovery books, reports, correspondence between state institutions, private notes in the Ottoman archives which are dated between the 18th and 20th centuries and the survey drawings created at the beginning of the 20th century. As a result of the research, in seven biographical manuscripts that are directly associated with Mimar Sinan and his works, written by himself, and have been the subject of many modern studies, it has been seen that the architect attaches special importance to the Büyükçekmece Bridge among the twelve bridges that he stated that he built. Mimar Sinan mentioned that he built the bridge in one of his biographies, Tezkiretü’l Ebniye. In Tezkiretü’l-Bünyân, he explained in detail the construction of the bridge that is the subject of our study, as one of the six structures that he cares about, and in Tuhfetü’l-Mi’mârîn, he stated that some of the bridge’s legs were damaged and rebuilt after the flood. Apart from the Sinan biographies, which describe the bridge and its construction, it has been determined that all the discovery books and reports in the Ottoman archives of the State Archives Directorate, which appear to belong to the Büyükçekmece Bridge, were prepared in extreme detail. So much so that, in a discovery book dated to the first half of the 19th century, the measurements of all the materials to be used were given one by one, and how the repair would be carried out, from the footing to the floor finishing element, was described. Survey drawings of the bridge prepared during World War I, provide extremely comprehensive information about the building, which was stated as a “historical work” for the first time in a document from the beginning of the 20th century and its immediate surroundings, and also reveal that the arch deformations observed on the bridge today also existed in those years.