Süleymaniye Mosque

This is the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. It may not be on most tourist guides, but trust us, it’s incredible and quite easy to get to. The best part? The mosque is perched on a hill, so the views are to die for! So get ready for some jaw-dropping photos and unforgettable memories. Just its name is enough to draw you in – after all, it’s the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. For those who’ve heard the tales, the very name of this legendary sultan carries whispers of faraway lands with satin-clad princes and sumptuous palaces. Well, at least, that’s the picture Europe got, thanks to the diplomatic visit of Charles V’s ambassador to Constantinople. He returned home awestruck, and it’s his starry-eyed accounts that earned Suleiman the nickname ‘Magnificent’. After all, it was under his reign that the Ottoman Empire saw its heyday. The ambassador couldn’t believe his eyes. There sat the Sultan, on a solid gold throne! And it wasn’t just him – everyone in the court, even the horses, were decked out in beautiful garments woven with gold thread and precious stones. The West clung to this image of opulence, but later, when tensions rose between Charles V’s Christian Europe and the Ottomans, they went with the not-so-flattering nickname “Grand Turk”. Suleiman took Belgrade, besieged Vienna and allied himself with France, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. In the East, on the other hand, he was known as the “Lawgiver”, for completely reforming the Ottoman legal system. He reviewed, in fact, the Ottoman penal code, and ensured fairness between Muslims and dhimmis, the non-Muslims. Pious as he was, he built mosques all over the empire, while advocating a tolerant Islam that respected Jewish and Christian minorities. In 1539, he chose Sinan, an Armenian-Christian, as his chief imperial architect. Sinan went on to develop and perfect the distinctive style that marked the era under Suleiman the Magnificent – he designed mosques with cascading domes that allowed for large windows that let in tons of light. Among them was the Süleymaniye Mosque! The immensity of the structure dawns on you. This isn’t just a mosque; it’s a whole complex of multiple buildings. The Süleymaniye is in fact a Külliye that spans an impressive 70 hectares, housing a madrasa and six theological colleges, a library, a hammam, a soup kitchen, a caravanserai, a hospital, a hospice and stores. The mosque was built in 7 years, as was customary, in a style inspired by the Hagia Sophia Basilica-Mosque-Museum-Mosque. It’s a marvel of engineering; Sinan was truly gifted. This is the 1600s, after all, and given the constraints, what he did was trully impressive. He created, for example, perfect acoustics with hollow cubes under the half-domes, to absorb any echoes. He also designed a perfect ventilation system, with no unpleasant draughts, but rather a gentle airflow to keep things fresh, and a mechanism that drew the smoke from the oil lamps outside. There was even a water drainage system to cool the water in summer and reduce humidity in winter, and water filtration to make it drinkable and redistribute it to the complex’s fountains. Wait, there’s more! Just like the Blue Mosque, they have ostrich eggs hanging from the ceiling! Yes, you heard that right! When mosques were being built under the Ottoman Empire, they’d hang ostrich eggs under the domes. The eggs were not emptied, and the smell kept the spiders away! So no web-spinning between the lanterns. It’s a win-win! And just imagine, there used to be 300 eggs in this mosque! Now there are only 30 left; some have hung there for 400 years. See if you can spot them – they’re brown now, so you wouldn’t really know they’re actual eggs. And to cap it all off, this mosque, built in 1550, is practically unbreakable! As a matter of fact, experts from all over the world have come to examine it and declared that it can withstand earthquakes of up to 9 on the Richter scale. The Süleymaniye Mosque is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.