Mihrimah Sultan Mosque, Uskudar

The Üsküdar mosque of Mihrimah Sultan — called Iskele Camii after the ferry landing-stage it overlooks — is the first of the two mosques Sinan built for Süleyman the Magnificent's only daughter, completed early in 1548 ¹.

It rises on a terrace above the square on land reclaimed from the sea — Pierre Gilles watched the harbour being filled to make its site ². Its plan is unusual: the central dome is carried by three semidomes — south, east and west, none to the north — giving the mosque a trefoil form; Freely reads Sinan's career as a steady shedding of semidomes, from four at the Şehzade to two at the Süleymaniye to none at the Selimiye, and he never repeated this arrangement ³. The külliye originally included a medrese, a primary school and an imaret, of which only the imaret has vanished ³. The interior is dark — the reason, Freely suggests, that Mihrimah demanded floods of light in the mosque she commissioned from Sinan on the Sixth Hill in 1562 ³.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 246–248 (Iskele Camii / Mihrimah at Üsküdar).