The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Turkey
12 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Turkey are Hagia Sophia, Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Chora Church (Kariye). The list covers 12 sacred places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Two empires left their sacred architecture in Anatolia. For more than a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of Eastern Christianity, building domed churches lined with mosaic, while in Cappadocia monks carved churches into soft volcanic rock. The Ottomans then took up the Byzantine dome and made it their own, and in the sixteenth century the architect Sinan perfected a series of imperial mosques that defined the skyline of Istanbul.
Hagia Sophia, completed under Justinian in 537, held the largest dome in the world for centuries and later served as a mosque. Across the square, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the Blue Mosque, rises with six minarets and interiors lined with Iznik tiles. The Chora Church keeps fourteenth-century mosaics and frescoes, including a famous Anastasis, that are among the finest late Byzantine art anywhere. Sinan's work appears in the Süleymaniye Mosque above the Golden Horn, in the small, tile-covered Rüstem Pasha Mosque, in the Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque and in the Selimiye Mosque at Edirne, which he called his masterpiece.
Further east, Sümela Monastery clings to a cliff face in the Pontic Mountains, and the thirteenth-century Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği is known for its carved stone portals. In Cappadocia, the Selime Cathedral is cut entirely into a rock outcrop, and the Tokalı Church at Göreme glows with deep blue frescoes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | ✓ |
| 2 | Sultan Ahmed Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 3 | Chora Church (Kariye) | Church building | ✓ |
| 4 | Selimiye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 5 | Süleymaniye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 6 | Sümela Monastery | Monastery | |
| 7 | Bursa Green Mosque | Mosque | |
| 8 | Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque, Kadırga | Mosque | |
| 9 | Rüstem Pasha Mosque | Mosque | |
| 10 | Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital | Mosque | ✓ |
| 11 | Selime Cathedral | Rock-cut church | |
| 12 | Tokalı Church | Rock-cut church |
01 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay The dome proved as fragile as it was bold. The original collapsed after an earthquake in 558, and Isidore the Younger rebuilt it about six metres higher and ribbed, so that its thrust would fall more steeply into the walls; later partial collapses were repaired in turn. The forty windows around its base make the dome seem to hover on a ring of light while also lightening its load.
Did you know? The present building is the third church on the site; the first was consecrated in 360 and the second, by Theodosius II, in 415.
02 Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OWPictures from Pixabay Its architect, Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, had spent twenty years as a mother-of-pearl craftsman before training under the great Mimar Sinan and turning to building design. His mosque became the first in the world raised with six minarets — a number that, until then, had been reserved for the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca.
Did you know? Some 260 windows light the interior, and part of their coloured glass was a gift from the Republic of Venice after a request from Ahmed in 1610.
03 Chora Church (Kariye)
Kariye Camii
Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.031° N 28.939° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Tadam · CC0 The name recalls the monastery's origin "in the country", outside the Constantinian city walls; once the Theodosian walls were built in the fifth century it found itself inside the city, and the old word became a theological pun, with Christ inscribed as the "Land of the Living" and the Virgin as the "Container of the Uncontainable".
Did you know? Around 1500 the grand vizier Hadım Ali Pasha turned the church into a mosque, adding a brick minaret and a mihrab while leaving the Byzantine plan intact.
04 Selimiye Mosque
Turkey · 1.2 km from Edirne41.678° N 26.559° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Mozder from Pixabay Sinan's aim was to match the dome of Hagia Sophia, and here he finally did: the hemispherical dome spans about 31 metres and rises some 42 metres, carried on eight massive piers that are partly merged into the outer walls. Because the thrust is hidden in buttresses, the walls between could be opened with row upon row of windows, and the prayer hall is flooded with light.
Did you know? The dome rests on just eight piers linked by arches, the most accomplished version of the eight-support plan Sinan developed over his career.
05 Süleymaniye Mosque
Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay 5 m across — exactly half its height. Walls of windows light it evenly; the decoration is restrained, which makes the few rich accents count: İznik tiles only around the mihrab, with blue, turquoise and red flowers on white and large calligraphic roundels, and stained-glass windows in the qibla wall usually attributed to Sarhoş İbrahim, spelling the names of God, the Prophet and the first four caliphs.
Did you know? Sinan's own small tomb stands just outside the complex walls to the north, a short walk from the mosque he designed for his sultan.
06 Sümela Monastery
Turkey · 29.1 km from Gümüşhane40.690° N 39.658° E
Rotadefterim · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tradition holds that the monastery was founded around 386, in the reign of Theodosius I, by two Athenian monks, Barnabas and Sophronius, who came here with an icon of the Virgin believed to have been painted by Saint Luke.
Did you know? Restoration works uncovered a secret tunnel leading to a chapel decorated with frescoes of heaven and hell, life and death.
07 Bursa Green Mosque
Yeşil Camii
Turkey · 2.3 km from Bursa40.182° N 29.075° E
Brücke-Osteuropa · Public domain Mehmed I came to the throne after a long struggle with his brothers that reunited the Ottoman state, and he commissioned the mosque in 1412. The inscription over the portal dates its completion to the turn of 1419–1420; the work was directed by his vizier and former commander Hacı İvaz Pasha.
Did you know? The two minarets can be reached only through the sultan's private apartments, by winding stairs that climb up into the attics.
08 Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque, Kadırga
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.972° E
Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Work began around 1568 and was completed in 1571 or 1572. Sinan had to fit the mosque onto a steep site, and he solved it by fronting the prayer hall with a two-storey courtyard. The lower storey was given over to shops whose rents supported the mosque; on the upper storey the spaces between the columns of the arcade were walled off to make small rooms, with windows, fireplaces and niches, for the students of the madrasa.
Did you know? The Iznik tiles, made with the underglaze technique at the height of the workshops' production, cover the qibla wall and all six pendentives.
09 Rüstem Pasha Mosque
Turkey · 0.5 km from Istanbul41.018° N 28.969° E
RramazanŞahin · CC0 The mosque was built for Rüstem Pasha, grand vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent and husband of the sultan's daughter Mihrimah. He died in 1561; Suleiman authorised the project the following year, and the imperial architect Mimar Sinan completed it around 1563. Sinan gave it a characteristically clever plan: an octagon set inside a rectangle, its central dome carried on four half-domes, with a single minaret.
Did you know? Its main dome rests on four half-domes placed on the diagonals of the building rather than on its main axes.
10 Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital
Turkey39.371° N 38.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
R Prazeres · CC BY-SA 4.0 What people travel here for is the portals. The north portal of the mosque is a towering niche so densely worked that it hardly reads as masonry: leaves, palmettes, rosettes and interlacing bands rise in deep relief, some almost free of the wall, as if the stone had been modelled rather than cut. Its exuberance has little parallel in the architecture of 13th-century Anatolia, which is why the building is often called the miracle of Divriği.
Did you know? One room of the hospital was set aside as a dynastic tomb, and a window links it directly to the prayer hall of the mosque.
11 Selime Cathedral
Selime Katedrali
Turkey38.301° N 34.259° E
Dudva · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cathedral is hollowed out as a full basilica: two rows of columns, left standing in the living rock, divide the interior into three aisles, a layout borrowed from built churches and translated into carved stone. The monastery is generally dated to the 8th and 9th centuries, while the wall paintings that survive inside are later, from around the late 10th and early 11th centuries.
Did you know? Four pit-looms cut into the floors show that textiles were woven on the premises, a sign of a busy household rather than a purely religious community.
12 Tokalı Church
Tokalı Kilise
Turkey · 10.7 km from Nevşehir38.641° N 34.845° E
Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Old Church, carved in the tenth century, is a barrel-vaulted room painted in soft reds and greens. Its vault reads like an illustrated book: three bands of narrative on each side, some thirty scenes of the Infancy, the Miracles and the Passion of Christ, running beneath a spine of medallions with prophets and saints.
Did you know? The frescoes were among the first targets of an international conservation programme by ICCROM, planned in 1972 and carried out over five missions until 1990.
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 sacred places in Turkey?
- On our list, Hagia Sophia ranks first, followed by Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Chora Church (Kariye).
- Who was Mimar Sinan?
- Sinan was the chief architect of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, serving under Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors. Among his hundreds of buildings are the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, which he considered his finest work.
- Why are there churches carved into rock in Cappadocia?
- Cappadocia's landscape is made of tuff, a soft volcanic rock that is easy to cut but hardens on exposure to air. Byzantine monks and communities hollowed churches, chapels and monasteries out of it and painted their walls with frescoes.
- Why is the Sultan Ahmed Mosque called the Blue Mosque?
- The name comes from the tens of thousands of blue-toned Iznik tiles that line its interior walls. The mosque was built in the early seventeenth century under Sultan Ahmed I.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 12 sacred places.