• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2020

Turkey is a transcontinental country located partly in Asia and partly in Europe, and hosted by diverse civilizations including Hittite, Urartu, Lydia, Phrygia, Pontius, Byzantine, Seljuk's and Ottomans. At various times, these built many historic monuments representing the most significant characteristics of their civilizations. Today, these monuments contribute enormously to the esthetic beauty of environment and important to many cities of Turkey in attracting tourism. The survival of these monuments depends on the investigation of structural behavior and implementation of needed repairing and/or strengthening applications. Hence, many countries have made deeper investigations and regulations to assess their monuments' structural behavior. This paper presents the dynamic behavior investigation of a monumental masonry mosque, the "İskenderpaşa Mosque" in Trabzon (Turkey), by performing an experimental examination with non-destructive testing. The dynamic behavior investigation was carried out by determining the dynamic characteristic called as natural frequencies, mode shapes and damping ratios. The experimental dynamic characteristics were extracted by Operational Modal Analysis (OMA). In addition, Finite Element (FE) model of masonry mosque was constructed in ANSYS software and the numerical dynamic characteristics such as natural frequencies and mode shapes were also obtained and compared to experimental ones. The paper aims at presenting the non-destructive testing procedure of a masonry mosque as well as the comparison of experimental and numerical dynamic characteristics obtained from the mosque.