Selimiye Mosque
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Selimiye Mosque And Its Social Complex, 2011); Mimar Sinan'S Own Declared Masterwork, Completed 1575 · Edirne, Edirne
Sinan was about eighty when he finished this, and he wrote that the Suleymaniye had been his journeyman work and the Selimiye was his masterwork - the only time the man who built four hundred buildings graded his own. The dome is 31.2 metres across, wider than Hagia Sophia's by Ottoman reckoning, and it sits on eight piers arranged so that the interior is one single undivided volume: you walk in and there is nothing between you and the far wall, which is the whole point and is not true of any earlier Ottoman mosque. Four minarets of about seventy metres stand at the corners, among the tallest ever built, and one of them carries three separate spiral staircases that never meet. The muezzin's platform sits in the middle of the floor with a small fountain beneath it. Edirne was the Ottoman capital before Istanbul, and this is what it kept. It is free, it is rarely busy, and after Sultanahmet that is startling.
Meydan Mahallesi, Mimar Sinan Caddesi, Edirne Merkez, Edirne, Edirne, Turkiye
Open daily and free as a working mosque. Tourist visiting is suspended for roughly ninety minutes around each of the five daily prayers and for longer at Friday midday. The madrasas of the complex, now the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, keep museum hours and a weekly closing day. Kirkpinar in late June or early July fills the city.