Yavuz Selim Mosque, Istanbul

The mosque of Sultan Selim the Grim stands on a high terrace on Istanbul's Fifth Hill overlooking the Golden Horn, beside the fifth-century Cistern of Aspar; it was completed in 1522 under his son Süleyman the Magnificent, though an Arabic inscription over the portal suggests Selim himself began it two or three years earlier ¹.

The plan is simple: a square room 24.5 metres on a side covered by a shallow dome 32.5 metres high which, like Haghia Sophia's and unlike most Turkish mosques', is distinctly less than a hemisphere, producing a spacious effect recalling the Pantheon ². Domed cruciform annexes to east and west gave access to four small rooms used as hospices for travelling dervishes, and the courtyard lunettes carry some of the earliest Iznik tiles in the city ². Behind the mosque stands Selim I's octagonal türbe, its dome ribbed on the outside; Evliya Çelebi records that he spent three years as reader of hymns at the sultan's tomb ³. The mosque is often ascribed to Sinan, but it is too early for him and absent from his Tezkere; its actual architect is unknown ¹.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 205–207 (mosque, tombs, surviving primary school).
• Freely explicitly rejects the attribution to Sinan; the architect is left unknown as in the source.