Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet)

The Sultanahmet Mosque, known as the Blue Mosque, was built between 1609 and 1617 for Sultan Ahmed I, with the work directed by Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, a pupil of Sinan. The building was conceived as an answer to Hagia Sophia standing opposite, so it was placed on the southern side of the ancient hippodrome and turned towards it with its main courtyard. A cascade of domes and semi-domes rises to a central dome about twenty-three and a half metres in diameter, and six minarets made the mosque an exception: sultans' mosques usually had four. The popular name comes from the interior decoration, more than twenty thousand Iznik tiles in shades of blue and turquoise covering the walls of the galleries and the upper tiers. Light comes in through more than two hundred windows, originally filled with coloured Venetian glass. The complex included a madrasa, a hospital, a caravanserai and the turbe of Ahmed I, and some of these buildings survive to this day. In the evening the facades are floodlit, and the silhouette with its six minarets is visible from the water and from the neighbouring hills. The mosque remains in use, and access for visitors is closed during prayers.

On the map