The Blue Mosque

Built between 1609 and 1616 for the young Sultan Ahmed I by the architect Sedefkar Mehmed Aga, a pupil of the great Sinan, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque was meant to rival Hagia Sophia, and from the Hippodrome or the garden between them it does. Its cascade of domes and half-domes climbs to a central dome, and six minarets, an unusual number that caused controversy at the time, frame it against the sky. Inside, the space is vast and light, carried on four colossal fluted piers nicknamed elephant feet, and it is the tiles that give the mosque its popular name: more than twenty thousand handmade Iznik tiles in tulip, carnation, cypress and rose patterns, most of them in the upper levels, in blues, greens and turquoise, lit by some two hundred stained-glass windows. It remains a working mosque, which is why it is free and why the visit has a rhythm: tourists enter through a separate visitors' entrance and are asked to leave before each of the five daily prayers, with a longer closure for the Friday noon prayer. In between, it is one of the great free experiences in the world. A long restoration closed parts of the mosque from 2018 until it fully reopened in 2023, with cleaned tiles, renewed carpets and new lighting, so the interior is now brighter and calmer than it has been for decades. Shoes come off at the door (bags are provided), women cover their hair and everyone covers shoulders and knees; loaner coverings are usually available.

How to time it: the mosque opens to visitors in the morning and closes to them for roughly an hour or more around each prayer, with the midday closure on Fridays the longest. Prayer times change daily with the sun, so check them on the morning of your visit and aim to arrive just after a prayer has finished, when the queue moves quickly and the interior is at its quietest. The first slot of the morning is ideal. The tourist queue forms at the visitors' entrance off the Hippodrome side; the courtyard, one of the largest of any Ottoman mosque, is worth a slow walk on the way in. Donations are welcome but entry is free, and there is no ticket: anyone offering to sell you one, or to guide you past the line, is a tout.

Inside, step to the side of the carpet so you do not block worshippers, stay behind the barriers that mark the prayer area and keep voices low. Look up to the upper galleries for the densest tilework, and to the dome and the stained glass for the light. The marble mihrab and minbar, carved from single blocks, and the sultan's loge are the main features near the front. Photography is generally allowed without flash, but never of people praying. A visit takes thirty to forty-five minutes. If you only have time for one great mosque, choose between this and the Suleymaniye: the Blue Mosque is grander and more decorated, the Suleymaniye calmer and more perfectly proportioned, and both are free.

Around the mosque: the Hippodrome, the old chariot-racing arena of Byzantine Constantinople, runs along its western side, with the Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III, the bronze Serpent Column from Delphi and the German Fountain. The Arasta Bazaar, a row of shops behind the mosque, is a calmer place to browse carpets and ceramics than the Grand Bazaar, and the Great Palace Mosaic Museum beneath it preserves floor mosaics from the Byzantine palace. In the evening the mosque is floodlit, and sitting in the garden between it and Hagia Sophia as the call to prayer echoes between the two is one of the defining moments of an Istanbul trip.