Dynamic characteristics of minarets of hoca tabip mosque

Abstract

With its thousands of years of history and traces from the past, Bursa is an open-air living history museum. Unfortunately Bursa is located in the earthquake zone and many catastrophic earthquakes occurred in the past. From inscriptions, it is learned that great majority of historical buildings like mosques, madrasahs, inns were damaged by the latest earthquake occurred in 1855. Because of their slender form, minarets were influenced much more than the other structures.Because one of the most important component of liabilities of our society is to preserve and transfer this historical heritage to our posterity, another problematic issue arise on this subject is the lack of literature about minarets. This is because that minarets were built in only Islamic regions. Furthermore, literature review shows that there are only a few scientific studies about seismic behavior of this type of structures. For the mentioned reasons, in this study, dynamic characteristics of Hoca Tabip Mosque which was built in 15th century, were evaluated. One of the in situ tests, modal analysis technique was carried out and the dynamic characteristics of the minaret were captured. At the same time the construction techniques were investigated. These results were compared with those obtained from the numerical model of minaret which was constituted using in situ size measuring. Finally, it was seen that the results from two approaches correspond to each other. In conclusion, it is shown that the numerical model which was carried out in this study represent actual structure with high accuracy.