The Most Beautiful Mosques in Turkey
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful mosques in Turkey are Hagia Sophia, Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Selimiye Mosque. The list covers 8 mosques. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Turkey's mosques record one long conversation with a single building. When the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 they inherited Hagia Sophia, whose dome had no equal, and their architects spent the next century and a half learning from it and trying to surpass it. Before that, the Seljuks of Anatolia had carved extraordinary stone portals, and the early Ottomans in Bursa had worked out a tiled, intimate style. The classical Ottoman mosque, a cascade of domes and half-domes framed by pencil-thin minarets, is the result.
Hagia Sophia itself heads the list, a sixth-century cathedral that became a mosque, and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque faces it across the old Hippodrome with six minarets and an interior of Iznik tile. The architect Mimar Sinan dominates the rest: the Süleymaniye Mosque crowns a hill above the Golden Horn, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne lifts its dome over a single unified space, and two smaller Istanbul mosques, Rüstem Pasha and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, are lined with some of the finest Iznik tiles ever made.
The Green Mosque in Bursa, from the early fifteenth century, takes its name from its glazed tiles and shows the Ottoman style before Istanbul. The Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği, built in the thirteenth century, is famous for portals carved in stone so deeply that they seem to grow like plants.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | ✓ |
| 2 | Sultan Ahmed Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 3 | Selimiye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 4 | Süleymaniye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 5 | Bursa Green Mosque | Mosque | |
| 6 | Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque, Kadırga | Mosque | |
| 7 | Rüstem Pasha Mosque | Mosque | |
| 8 | Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital | Mosque | ✓ |
01 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay Hagia Sophia was secularised as a museum in 1935 and reclassified as a mosque in 2020, a decision that drew strong criticism abroad. It is a working mosque again: most of the ground floor is reserved for worship, while visitors see the interior from the upper galleries. Women need to cover their hair, and access is limited around prayer times. A major structural programme to strengthen the dome against earthquakes began in 2025, so expect scaffolding. Around it the old city keeps the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, built in 1616 to outshine it, the Basilica Cistern beneath the site of Justinian's civic basilica, and the older church of Hagia Irene.
Did you know? Enrico Dandolo, the elderly Venetian doge who led the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204, was buried inside the building.
02 Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OWPictures from Pixabay Inside, more than 20,000 handmade İznik ceramic tiles in dozens of blue patterns cover the upper walls and domes — the reason the whole world calls it the Blue Mosque, even though every official document, then and now, simply calls it the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Architecturally, it borrows its cascading domes and half-domes directly from the Hagia Sophia across the square, fused with the taller, more vertical proportions Sinan had perfected a generation earlier.
Did you know? The mosque stands on the seating stands and imperial box of the Byzantine Hippodrome, and ancient seats turned up in its courtyard during early 20th-century digs.
03 Selimiye Mosque
Turkey · 1.2 km from Edirne41.678° N 26.559° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Mozder from Pixabay The mosque, together with its religious schools, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011. The former medreses now house a foundations museum and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts of Edirne, and the mosque's hilltop site makes it visible across the whole city.
Did you know? Two of the minarets contain three separate spiral staircases, so three muezzins could climb to the three balconies without ever meeting.
04 Süleymaniye Mosque
Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay The mosque was only the centre of a whole foundation: madrasas, a school of medicine and a hospital, a public kitchen, a caravanserai and baths surrounded it, arranged around the mosque on the hilltop. Behind the qibla wall, in a walled garden cemetery, stand the octagonal tombs of Suleiman and of his wife Hürrem Sultan (Roxelana); Suleiman's tomb has some of the earliest İznik tiles with the brilliant emerald green that became a hallmark of the kilns. The terraces behind the mosque give one of the finest views over the Golden Horn. With its surroundings, the Süleymaniye forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Historic Areas of Istanbul.
Did you know? Sinan likened the four great dome-bearing columns, each roughly nine metres tall, to the four rightly guided caliphs of early Islam.
05 Bursa Green Mosque
Yeşil Camii
Turkey · 2.3 km from Bursa40.182° N 29.075° E
Brücke-Osteuropa · Public domain Bursa, at the foot of Mount Uludağ, the Mysian Olympus of antiquity, was the Ottoman capital before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and its early mosques, tombs and markets have formed a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014.
Did you know? The domes, now covered in lead, were originally clad in blue and green tiles that gave the outside of the building its colour too.
06 Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque, Kadırga
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.972° E
Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside, the prayer hall is planned as a hexagon set within a rectangle, covered by a single dome 13 metres across and 22.8 metres high, with four small half-domes in the corners. The walls are famous for their Iznik tiles, with flowering designs in blue, red and green, and panels of white calligraphy in thuluth script on a blue ground. The tall marble minbar wears a conical cap sheathed in tiles, and stained glass fills the windows above the mihrab. Small fragments said to come from the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca are set above the entrance, in the minbar and in the mihrab. The walls themselves are of granite and marble, and the interior columns are of coloured marble.
Did you know? Visitors enter by a staircase that passes directly beneath the madrasa's domed teaching hall before emerging into the courtyard.
07 Rüstem Pasha Mosque
Turkey · 0.5 km from Istanbul41.018° N 28.969° E
RramazanŞahin · CC0 Some 2,300 İznik tiles in around 80 patterns cover the porch facade, the walls, the mihrab and the minbar. Floral designs spread over the walls, mixed with geometric panels, and one panel shows a view of the Kaaba in Mecca. What makes these tiles historically important is the red: they show one of the earliest uses of Armenian bole, a vivid tomato-red pigment. In the dim interior the colours glow rather than shine, and a slow walk around the walls, pier by pier, is the best way to see how many different designs Sinan's patrons commissioned. A restoration of the building was completed in 2021.
Did you know? The mosque has no foundation inscription, so its date has been reconstructed from land deeds and a water deed showing it was still unfinished in December 1562.
08 Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital
Turkey39.371° N 38.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
R Prazeres · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside, the mood changes completely. The prayer hall is a forest of stout stone piers carrying vaults, every bay covered by a stone vault, and the wooden minbar, dated 1243, was signed by a craftsman from Tiflis. Next door the hospital, the dar al-shifa or "house of healing", gathers its rooms and iwans around a covered court with a small pool at its centre. The complex was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, and a long restoration of the stonework was completed in 2024.
Did you know? Inscriptions name six different craftsmen across the complex, among them a carver from Ahlat, a minbar maker from Tiflis and a calligrapher.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful mosques in Turkey?
- On our list, Hagia Sophia ranks first, followed by Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Selimiye Mosque.
- Who was Mimar Sinan?
- Mimar Sinan was the chief architect of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, serving several sultans. He designed the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, which he regarded as his masterpiece.
- What are Iznik tiles?
- Iznik tiles are glazed ceramics made in the town of İznik, at their height in the sixteenth century. They are known for cobalt blue, turquoise and a vivid raised red, and cover the interiors of mosques such as Rüstem Pasha and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.
- Why does the Sultan Ahmed Mosque have six minarets?
- Six minarets were an unusual mark of imperial prestige for the mosque of Sultan Ahmed I. The popular story that the number came from a misheard order for gold minarets is a legend.
- How many mosques are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 8 mosques.