The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Mosques in the World
14 places in 10 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed mosques in the world are Hagia Sophia (Turkey), Koutoubia Mosque (Morocco) and Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Turkey). The list covers 14 UNESCO-listed mosques in 10 countries. Turkey has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A mosque earns World Heritage status when it marks a turning point in how the Islamic world built: the first great Umayyad monuments, the Abbasid experiments in brick, the Persian four-iwan court, the Ottoman domes of Mimar Sinan, the earthen mosques of West Africa. These buildings span thirteen centuries and three continents, yet each organises the same essentials, a prayer hall turned towards Mecca, a courtyard and a minaret, in its own way.
Hagia Sophia, Justinian's 6th-century church, became a mosque after 1453 and set the challenge Ottoman architects spent a century answering. Istanbul's Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the Blue Mosque, answers it with six minarets and an interior of Iznik tiles, and Sinan's Süleymaniye crowns one of the city's hills. Sinan himself considered the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne his masterpiece, its single dome rising over an open, light-filled hall.
The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in the 7th century, is a reference point for the mosques of North Africa, and Marrakesh's Koutoubia carries its minaret high above the medina. The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan is a textbook of Iranian architecture across many centuries, with four iwans around a great court. In Mali, the Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud-brick building in the world, re-plastered every year by the townspeople, while the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque recall the faith's earliest monuments.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 2 | Koutoubia Mosque | Mosque | Morocco | ✓ |
| 3 | Sultan Ahmed Mosque | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 4 | Great Mosque of Djenné | Mosque | Mali | ✓ |
| 5 | Dome of the Rock | Mosque | Palestine | ✓ |
| 6 | Umayyad Mosque | Mosque | Syria | ✓ |
| 7 | Selimiye Mosque | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 8 | Jameh Mosque of Isfahan | Mosque | Iran | ✓ |
| 9 | Great Mosque of Samarra | Mosque | Iraq | ✓ |
| 10 | Süleymaniye Mosque | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 11 | Great Mosque of Kairouan | Mosque | Tunisia | ✓ |
| 12 | Mosque of Ibn Tulun | Mosque | Egypt | ✓ |
| 13 | Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba | Cathedral | Spain | ✓ |
| 14 | Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
01 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay The building that stands today was put up in barely five years. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537.
Did you know? Envoys of the Kievan Rus' prince reported that inside they could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth, a verdict tied to Rus' conversion to Orthodoxy.
02 Koutoubia Mosque
Morocco · 1.2 km from Marrakesh31.624° N 7.994° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay The minaret of the Koutoubia is the landmark by which Marrakesh has measured itself for eight centuries. It rises about 77 m, its main square shaft almost 13 m wide, built of rubble masonry and sandstone that takes on a pink-gold tone in the evening.
Did you know? The minaret has no stairs: a broad internal ramp winds past six stacked rooms, wide enough for the muezzin to ride a horse to the top.
03 Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OWPictures from Pixabay Sultan Ahmed I commissioned this at just 19 years old, and it was built between 1609 and 1616 — a low point in Ottoman fortunes, coming right after an unfavorable peace ended a long war with Persia. An imperial mosque of this scale was, among other things, a calculated show of confidence: proof the empire hadn't actually faltered. Ahmed died the year after it was finished, at 27.
Did you know? The tile orders swallowed the entire İznik industry, and in 1613 the sultan banned making or selling tiles for anyone else until his were finished.
04 Great Mosque of Djenné
Mali · 0.8 km from Djenné13.905° N 4.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
BluesyPete · CC BY-SA 3.0 This is the largest mud-brick building on Earth, raised on a platform above the Bani River floodplain to keep it above the annual floodwaters. Its present form dates to a 1907 reconstruction, built on foundations going back to the 13th century.
Did you know? The spires crowning the three towers of the prayer wall are each topped with an ostrich egg.
05 Dome of the Rock
Palestine · 2.7 km from Jerusalem31.778° N 35.235° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by best-biketours from Pixabay The Dome of the Rock is the oldest surviving major work of Islamic architecture, and its golden dome is the image most people carry of Jerusalem. The octagonal shrine stands at the centre of the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, in the Old City.
Did you know? Abd al-Malik's shrine reportedly cost seven times the annual tax revenue of Egypt.
06 Umayyad Mosque
Syria · 1.3 km from Damascus33.511° N 36.307° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SLPix from Pixabay The Umayyad Mosque, the Great Mosque of Damascus, stands in the old city on a site that has been holy for about three thousand years. The Arameans built a temple here to the storm god Hadad; the Romans enlarged it into a vast sanctuary of Jupiter, whose inner enclosure walls still form the outer walls of the mosque; and at the end of the fourth century it became a cathedral.
Did you know? About 12,000 labourers built the mosque, among them Coptic, Persian, Indian, Greek and North African craftsmen.
07 Selimiye Mosque
Turkey · 1.2 km from Edirne41.678° N 26.559° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Mozder from Pixabay The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne is the building its architect considered his masterpiece. Mimar Sinan, the chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, built it for Sultan Selim II between 1568 and 1575, and it is widely regarded as the summit of Ottoman — and much of Islamic — architecture.
Did you know? Sinan was about 80 when he built the Selimiye, which he called his masterwork after the Şehzade, his apprentice work, and the Süleymaniye, his journeyman work.
08 Jameh Mosque of Isfahan
Iran · 3.8 km from Isfahan32.670° N 51.685° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Hamidespanani · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, the city's Friday Mosque, is less a single building than a thousand-year archive of Iranian architecture. A mosque has stood on this site since around 771, and it was rebuilt, extended and redecorated by nearly every dynasty that ruled the city until modern times.
Did you know? The first mosque on the site, built around 771 under the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, measured roughly 52 by 90 metres.
09 Great Mosque of Samarra
Iraq · 1.4 km from Samarra34.206° N 43.880° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Chris Hoare · CC BY 2.0 In the 9th century the Abbasid caliphs left Baghdad and built a new capital upstream on the east bank of the Tigris. Samarra was founded by al-Mu'tasim in 836 and remained the seat of the caliphate until 892, and in those few decades it filled with palaces and mosques. Its grandest monument was the Great Mosque raised by Caliph al-Mutawakkil between 848 and 851.
Did you know? The minaret's name, al-Malwiya, is usually rendered as the snail-shell tower, after the ramp coiling around it.
10 Süleymaniye Mosque
Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay The Süleymaniye crowns Istanbul's Third Hill, and from the water its silhouette — a great central dome shouldered by cascading half-domes and four slender minarets — is one of the defining outlines of the old city's skyline. It was built for Suleiman the Magnificent by his chief architect Mimar Sinan; the inscription over the entrance gives 1550 for the foundation and 1557 for the inauguration.
Did you know? Sinan is said to have channelled the smoke of the mosque's oil lamps into a chamber above the entrance, where the soot was gathered and turned into calligraphers' ink.
11 Great Mosque of Kairouan
Tunisia · 0.4 km from Kairouan35.681° N 10.104° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
weetoon66 · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Great Mosque of Kairouan, also known as the Mosque of Uqba, stands at the heart of one of the oldest cities of Islamic North Africa. Kairouan was founded in 670 by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi as a garrison town on the dry plain of central Tunisia, and a mosque was laid out at the same time.
Did you know? The prayer hall holds 414 columns, and the mosque as a whole has more than 500.
12 Mosque of Ibn Tulun
Egypt · 2.6 km from Cairo30.029° N 31.250° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The Mosque of Ibn Tulun is the oldest mosque in Egypt that survives largely in its original form, and one of the largest in Egypt by area: with its outer enclosure it covers more than 26,000 square metres.
Did you know? The Kufic frieze beneath the ceiling reproduces roughly one fifteenth of the entire Qur'an, making this the oldest surviving Islamic monument with religious inscriptions of such length.
13 Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba
Mezquita-catedral de Córdoba
Spain · 0.8 km from Córdoba37.879° N 4.779° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by clarbner from Pixabay What stands today began in 785–786 as a mosque built by Abd al-Rahman I, expanded three times over the following two centuries into the largest mosque in the western Islamic world — the famous forest of over 800 double-arched columns dates from this period, roughly seven and a half centuries before anyone connected to the building's later Renaissance work was even born.
Did you know? According to traditional accounts, the Byzantine emperor sent a master mosaicist and about 1,600 kg of glass tesserae to decorate the caliph's new mihrab.
14 Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital
Turkey39.371° N 38.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
R Prazeres · CC BY-SA 4.0 Divriği is a small town in the uplands of Sivas Province, and above its roofs, just below the citadel, stands one of the most astonishing pieces of stone carving in the Islamic world. The mosque and the hospital attached to it were raised together in 1228–1229 under the Mengujekids, a minor Anatolian dynasty whose Divriği branch ruled this valley.
Did you know? Each aisle of the prayer hall is roofed with a different star-patterned stone vault, so the ceilings never repeat from one bay to the next.
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 UNESCO-listed mosques in the world?
- On our list, Hagia Sophia (Turkey) ranks first, followed by Koutoubia Mosque (Morocco) and Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Turkey).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed mosques in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Turkey (5), Egypt (1) and Iran (1).
- Why is the Sultan Ahmed Mosque called the Blue Mosque?
- Because of the blue-toned Iznik tiles that line its interior. It was built in Istanbul between 1609 and 1616 for Sultan Ahmed I.
- Who was Mimar Sinan?
- The chief architect of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, responsible for hundreds of buildings. His best-known mosques are the Süleymaniye in Istanbul and the Selimiye in Edirne.
- How is the Great Mosque of Djenné maintained?
- Its mud-brick walls are re-plastered each year in a festival in which the people of Djenné apply a fresh coat of mud. The protruding palm-wood beams serve as scaffolding for the work.
- How many UNESCO-listed mosques are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 14 UNESCO-listed mosques in 10 countries. Turkey has the most, with 5.