Does anyone know of any churches / cathedrals that have been converted to mosques in which the mihrab is aligned with the church's original axiality?

by clintmccool

(This might not be the best place to post this question in, but I'm giving it a shot. I've also posted this in r/architecture.)

I just spent a week or so in Istanbul, and some of the zillions of interesting things I saw there were old churches that had since been converted to mosques.

Since the axial alignment of the churches (typically east-west, in my understanding) did not "match" the alignment of the mihrab (to Mecca, more or less southeast from Istanbul) the mihrab was always noticeably off-axis (versus purpose-built mosques in which the mihrab is usually on-axis.)

Since the conversion of churches/cathedrals to mosques was fairly widespread, I was wondering if anyone knew of any converted churches/cathedrals in which the mihrab was not off-axis and fit in (more) seamlessly to the original layout, i.e. was on one of the two major axes in most churches.

One thought I had was maybe there were some churches that were due east/west/north/south of Mecca, so when the conversion took place the mihrab was placed along a primary axis of the original structure.

But this is sort of a tricky thing to google, I've discovered, so I thought I'd try here first.

Thanks for any help, and feel free to point me in a better direction if this question doesn't fit here.

jdryan08

Wish I could say that I had seen one like this, but I've been to many converted churches elsewhere in Anatolia and never seen it. Purely from my own experience, these conversions were done with pretty strict attention to where Mecca is, as were Greek churches w/r/t Jerusalem, so it would stand to reason that you'd have to find a converted Greek/Orthodox church that exists on a line with both Jerusalem and Mecca. This would mean looking around in SW Turkey, between Bursa and Izmir or farther east in Thrace. It's possible too that you might see this in Bulgaria, but I don't know if converted churches there weren't converted back to churches after Bulgarian independence.