‘Ali Bey al-Turguman

Description (The direction towards Mecca (Qibla) is described as eastern and other directions are named accordingly)

The lot facing the Sultan Ahmad Street with its western elevation is divided into two parts: the northern part contains a two-storey building of a roughly square plan with a narrow courtyard behind (with a secondary entrance in the northern wall); the narrower southern part comprises of a courtyard in its western section and a single-storey rectangular burial chamber by the eastern wall. The neo-Mamluk façade of the main building is symmetrical and tripartite. The quality of stonemasonry is very high. The central part is taken by the entrance portal that is set in a full-height recess and includes all typical elements of a Circassian Mamluk porch such as this in the nearby mosques of Sultan Qaitbey (monument No 99, AD 1474) and Sultan Farag Ibn Barquq (No 149, 1400-11): a rectangular door flanked with “gals” (plural: galas) seats and topped with a lintel supported on muqarnas corbels to the sides, with a flat arch of joggled voussoirs with intrados forming a segmental relieving arch over the lintel; a recessed inscription band (in this case empty) to the sides (originally at about eye level); a rectangular small window above the door with a flat muqarnas hood; the crowning muqarnas hood; all framed in knotted mouldings. A marble plaque with an inscription in fina ruqa’ script in raised relief is set into the monolithic limestone lintel of the entrance door. The crowning hood is a combination of a flat muqarnas hood with a trilobe arrangement. The intertwining endings of the knotted mouldings over the entrance door are complex, angular, and closely-knit. This does not resemble Mamluk forms, but late Ottoman ones that kept in use well into the 19th century; it may therefore may represent a living architectural tradition rather than part of Mamluk Revival. A marble panel with a single-line calligraphic inscription stating the name of the deceased person and the date is inserted into a recess in the limestone door lintel. As the street level has risen considerably, the building is reached by a few steps leading down, and the side “gals” seats by the door have been rebuilt on a higher level, while the (empty) inscription band is now awkwardly low.
To the sides of the central entrance portal are shallower full-height recesses topped with flat muqarnas friezes that each contain a rectangular ground floor window with a typically Circassian Mamluk arrangement of a rectangular panel of knotted mouldings that frames the lintel and above it a flat arch of stepped voussoirs with the intrados forming a segmental relieving arch over the lintel. The right-side one is a sabil window with larger openings at the bottom of the window grille and a stone ledge. The large rectangular upper floor windows are flanked with colonnettes with muqarnas capitals and topped with rectilinear keel-arch fluted flat niches. The façade is crowned with fleur-de-lys crenelations and terminates to the left with an engaged corner column with a muqarnas capital.
The side elevations are undecorated save the crenelations on top, built of rough stone and plastered, with irregularly placed windows, while the rough-stone back wall of the main building is plain and un-plastered.
The entrance gate leads to a vestibule from which the rooms in the building are accessed, and from which a gate topped with a semi-circular arch leads to the courtyard to the south. At the eastern end of the courtyard stands a single-storey burial chamber. Like the rest of the courtyard and interior of the vestibule, it is covered with cement plaster with a crude imitation of stone courses. The façade of the mausoleum is tripartite, with the door placed between two windows. Over the openings are knotted-moulding frames that repeat those on the front façade, and covered with thick wash. Inside the frames are plain rectangles of plaster with very crudely and non-tectonically imitated stone courses. In the flat roof of the mausoleum is an octagonal lantern.
The mausoleum contains a single marble cenotaph richly decorated in the Ottoman Baroque style.