The Sultan Ahmed Mosque sits on the south side of the old Hippodrome in Sultanahmet, a short tram ride on the T1 to Sultanahmet stop. You enter through a side gate as a visitor, not through the main courtyard during prayer. Shoes off, shoulders covered, a scarf for women at the door. The interior is a single great volume: Iznik tiles, stained glass, four massive piers, a cascade of half-domes under the main dome. Ten minutes of looking up is the visit. The courtyard is the pause.
How a sultan answered Hagia Sophia
Ahmed I ordered it in 1609. Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, a student of Sinan, built it in seven years. The site was the Byzantine Hippodrome’s royal box and palaces. Istanbul already had Hagia Sophia as the great dome of the city. Ahmed wanted a mosque that could stand next to it, with six minarets — a number that caused a row because the Haram in Mecca then had six. A seventh was added in Mecca to settle it. The tiles, more than 20,000, are Iznik work at the end of that industry’s best period: tulips, carnations, a lot of blue that later gave the building its European name.
Ahmed died young. The mosque became his monument and his tomb. It is still a working mosque, not a museum, which is why the nave closes to tourists at prayer times and on Friday midday. The Hippodrome outside is now a park with two obelisks and the Serpent Column. The axis between this mosque and Hagia Sophia is the civic centre of old Constantinople, still.
Why the square is packed
People come because the skyline from the Marmara and from Galata needs those six minarets, because the tiles are the most complete Iznik interior you can walk into, and because the building is free. It is popular in a way that hurts the visit at 11 a.m. in August. Early and late are still a mosque. Midday is a file of people in rented skirts.
The blue is overstated in photographs. The real colour is a cooler tile-and-stone grey with blue panels. Look at the gallery tiles if the ground floor is a crush.
If you go
Do Hagia Sophia and this mosque as two stops with a pause on the Hippodrome, not as back-to-back interiors. Check prayer times. Do not use the mosque as a sunrise mission from a cruise ship unless you like sharing the carpet with two thousand people who had the same idea. The Basilica Cistern is downhill. The rest of Sultanahmet can wait; the two domes cannot both be rushed.
