*WS 131: the beautiful Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey*
We were in Istanbul, Turkey on a free-n-easy trip for 5 days in 2012. We visited quite a few big mosques, and the most beautiful to us is this Suleymaniye Mosque, not the more famous Blue Mosque. This is a mosque built by Sultan Suleyman of the Ottoman Empire in 1557 and named after him. His intention was to build a mosque comparable in standing to the Christian cathedral Hagia Sophia built over a thousand years earlier.
Like in all royal mosques there is a central courtyard with 4 minarets at the corners, each 74 m tall. The courtyard has a colonnaded peristyle (veranda) with granite and marble columns. The interior is almost a square, 59 m by 58 m, forming a single vast space. The main dome is 53 m high and a diameter of 26.5 m or half the height, based on the design of the dome in the Hagia Sophia. There are many more smaller domes and half domes.
The interior is simply beautiful with a giant chandelier hanging below the main dome. It is well decorated with stained glasses and Iznik tiles which are special ceramic titles produced in Iznik in Turkey during the Middle Ages. The 7th photo shows a decoration while the 8th the mihrab, a niche in the wall indicating the direction of Mecca.
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