Mosques of Istanbul

Stories & lenses

Two threads that run through the corpus: fifteen centuries of domes on one scale, and Sinan's path from apprentice work to master work.

Domes at one scale

Istanbul domes at the same scale

Istanbul's domes across a millennium and a half, on one metric scale drawn like a section: left to right in order of completion, the vertical scale gives the real height from floor to the crown of the dome, and the figure above each dome is its diameter. The era sits under each dome; Sinan's own works (apprentice · çıraklık, journeyman · kalfalık) are picked out in colour.

The master's path in three stages

Sinan Tree

Sinan himself called Şehzade his apprentice work (çıraklık eseri), Süleymaniye his journeyman work (kalfalık), and the Selimiye in Edirne his master work (ustalık).

Curated walks

Two walks are open in full — the imperial centre and a short waterfront. The other thirteen live in the app.

The Heart of Sultanahmet

4 · 3 h · Imperial

A thousand years of dome-building in four stops. We start from Justinian's Hagia Sophia — the school the whole Ottoman world learned from — then read the answer of Sinan's workshop (the Blue Mosque) and Sinan's own (Sokollu), before returning to the sixth century at the end: the tiny Küçük Ayasofya, its contemporary. Compact, everything within a ten-minute walk, gently sloping down toward the Sea of Marmara.

Karaköy: Three Odd Mosques of the Port

3 · 2 h · Neighbourhood

A short walk through the old port quarter, where no mosque looks like a mosque. Yeraltı ('the underground') hides in the cellar of a Byzantine fortress tower: a low hall of six rows of columns, above the maqams of two warriors of the caliphate — a site revealed, by tradition, to a dervish in a dream. Arap Camii is a former fourteenth-century Dominican church, with Gothic windows and a square bell tower instead of a minaret. And finally Sokollu Azapkapı — late Sinan, an octagon on a raised platform right by the bridge. An hour and a half, all of it flat.