In the heart of Sultanahmet, Istanbul's oldest neighbourhood, rises one of the most photographed skylines on the planet: six slender minarets and a cascade of domes and half-domes crowning the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, known around the world as the Blue Mosque. The young Sultan Ahmed I had it built between 1609 and 1617, with the openly stated ambition of matching —or surpassing— Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine basilica standing opposite, which for a thousand years had been the ultimate benchmark of religious architecture in the city.
Its popular nickname comes from what you see inside: more than 20,000 İznik ceramic tiles, with floral motifs in shades of blue and green, cover much of the upper walls and create a softly filtered light quite unlike that of any other Ottoman mosque. Add to that a controversy that marked its construction, the one over the six minarets, and a full restoration that, just a few years ago, brought back all the shine of the tiles and the main dome.
This guide brings together what you need to know to visit it well: the actual visiting hours (which change with the season and are interrupted several times a day for prayers), what to ask for at the clothing booth if you don't come prepared, what to look at inside and in the surroundings —the Hippodrome, the Egyptian obelisk, the Serpent Column— and how to combine it with the rest of Sultanahmet's historic centre.
Llegamos en el peor momento para un turista y en el mejor para entender el lugar: la mezquita cerrada a la visita, la calle entera caminando rápido hacia el llamado.
Read my full story →The Blue Mosque was built between 1609 and 1617 on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I, who wanted to raise an imperial mosque capable of rivalling Hagia Sophia, located right opposite. The project was led by Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, a pupil of the great architect Mimar Sinan, and it sparked a notorious controversy over its six minarets, a number until then reserved for Islam's holiest mosque, the one in Mecca. Its worldwide fame, however, comes from its interior: more than 20,000 İznik ceramic tiles that tint its walls blue and green. After a full restoration that took several years, the mosque reopened for worship in April 2023 with its tiles, dome and minarets fully restored. We tell this story in detail on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1603, Ahmed I took the Ottoman throne aged just 13, in an empire going through a tricky moment: the war against the Habsburgs ended in 1606 with the Peace of Zsitvatorok, a treaty that, for the first time, treated the Ottoman sultan almost as an equal of the Austrian emperor, something Istanbul experienced as a loss of prestige rather than a victory. On top of that came an unwritten but very firm Ottoman tradition: sultans built their great imperial mosque with the spoils and funds won in victorious military campaigns. Ahmed I's problem was that, being so young, he had no conquest of his own to pay for such a project.
What's more, Ahmed I was the first sultan in over thirty years to set out to build an imperial mosque of his own: his immediate predecessors, Murad III and Mehmed III, had not built theirs, so the last great sultan's mosque dated back to the reign of Selim II, who died in 1574. Even so, and despite having no victories to show, Ahmed I decided to build anyway, paying for the work from the state treasury instead of war spoils. The decision met strong resistance from the ulema, the empire's religious scholars, who went as far as questioning whether it was religiously legitimate to spend public money this way and, so the story goes, even banned prayer in the new mosque for a while during construction. Over the years, however, the building's magnificence and the ceremony with which it was unveiled ended up winning public acceptance.
The man in charge of designing and building the new imperial mosque was Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, an architect born in Elbasan (in present-day Albania) who had come to Istanbul through the devşirme, the recruitment of young Christian boys from the Balkans into the sultan's service. For much of his career he specialised in carving and inlaying mother-of-pearl (sedef in Turkish), the craft that earned him the nickname 'Sedefkâr' by which he is remembered, before turning to architecture.
Mehmed Ağa trained as a pupil of the greatest of all Ottoman architects, Mimar Sinan, and became his chief assistant, running the building office whenever the master was away. In 1606, with a well-established career behind him, he was appointed chief architect of the Ottoman court, succeeding Dalgıç Ahmed Ağa. Just three years later, in 1609, Ahmed I gave him the commission of his life: building the new imperial mosque, which Mehmed Ağa worked on almost exclusively until it was finished, blending in its design the lessons of his master Sinan with a clear desire to engage with — and compete against — Hagia Sophia.
Work on the new mosque began in 1609, on a strategic plot of the former Hippodrome of Constantinople, right across from Hagia Sophia. The choice of site was no accident: placing the new imperial mosque face to face with the great Byzantine basilica, an Ottoman mosque since 1453, was in itself a gesture of architectural and political ambition. Ahmed I wanted a mosque that could match Hagia Sophia in grandeur, and even outdo it in some respects, such as the richness of its interior decoration.
Construction took eight years and was declared complete in 1617, just weeks before Ahmed I himself died, aged only 27. He never saw the interior decoration fully finished, although he did get to open the building and pray in it. After his death he was buried in a mausoleum (türbe) built next to the mosque, within the same religious complex, which also included a madrasa, a hospital and other buildings, following the classic model of the great Ottoman pious foundations.
No detail of the new mosque caused as much of a stir as the decision to give it six minarets. Until then, that number was associated almost exclusively with the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, the holiest mosque in Islam, which also had six at the time. That a sultan — and one with no military campaigns of his own to justify such spending, at that — should match the most revered shrine in the Muslim world in minarets was seen in some religious circles as excessive ambition, if not an outright affront.
There's a very popular legend, repeated endlessly in guidebooks, that the architect misheard the sultan's order to build 'altın' (gold) minarets as 'altı' (six), and that to sort out the mess Ahmed I ordered a seventh minaret to be added to the mosque in Mecca. It's an appealing story, but serious historical research considers it apocryphal: there is no documentation from the period to back it up, and it's a later tale that circulates as an anecdote rather than a verified fact. What is a fact is that the religious and political controversy was real, and that the mosque kept its six minarets — four next to the main body of the building (with three balconies each) and two smaller ones at the corners of the courtyard (with two balconies) — which over time became one of Istanbul's most recognisable trademarks.
If the minarets were the scandal of the project, the mosque's real artistic triumph lies inside: more than 20,000 ceramic tiles made in the workshops of İznik (ancient Nicaea), the Anatolian city that in the 16th and 17th centuries was the great Ottoman centre of ceramic production. The tiles combine more than fifty different designs, with floral motifs — tulips, carnations, roses, cypresses — painted in a palette of blues and greens on a white background, and they cover much of the upper walls of the prayer hall.
Ahmed I was so committed to the quality of this decoration that in 1613 he went as far as issuing a decree banning the İznik workshops from making tiles for any other client until his mosque's order was complete, a measure that shows the absolute priority this project had during his reign. The result, together with the light streaming in through more than 200 original stained-glass windows, is an interior bathed in a particular blue that, as the decades went by, ended up giving the mosque the nickname by which half the world knows it today: the Blue Mosque.
Like any building more than four centuries old, the Blue Mosque has suffered from the passage of time, earthquakes, a fire in the early 20th century and successive maintenance works, including a repainting of the interior decoration in 1883. The most thorough intervention in its entire history only came in recent decades: a full restoration lasting several years, with special attention to cleaning and consolidating the İznik tiles, the main dome and the minarets (in one of which preliminary surveys detected a shift of about 5 centimetres). During that period much of the interior was covered in scaffolding and the mosque could only be partly visited.
The work was completed and the mosque reopened for worship on 21 April 2023, coinciding with the first day of the festival marking the end of Ramadan (Eid al-Fitr), with an opening ceremony attended by the country's authorities. Today the Blue Mosque shows off its restored tiles, dome and six minarets, remains a fully working place of worship with five daily prayers, and continues to be, together with Hagia Sophia and the rest of the Sultanahmet ensemble, part of the site listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site under the name Historic Areas of Istanbul.
