Atik Valide Mosque, Üsküdar

Atik Valide Camii — the last imperial mosque complex Sinan erected — stands on a hill above Üsküdar; he built it for the valide sultan Nurbanu, wife of Selim II and mother of Murat III, and its dedicatory inscription dates it A.H. 978 (1570–1) to 991 (1583), the most extensive of Sinan's Istanbul works after the Süleymaniye ¹.

Nurbanu was born Cecelia Venier-Baffo on the Aegean island of Paros, captured in 1537 at twelve and sold in Istanbul's slave market; she entered the Topkapı harem, became Selim's haseki and then valide sultan, her son's most trusted adviser until her death in April 1582 ². Besides the mosque the külliye held a medrese, darüşşifa hospital, imaret, tabhane, darülhadis, darülkurra, mektep, caravanserai, dervish hospice and hamam ¹.

An alley beside the graveyard leads to one of the city's loveliest courtyards — a grand cloister of domed bays on marble columns around a marble-grilled şadırvan flanked by two giant hollow plane trees ³. The prayer hall is a wide rectangle under a central dome 12.7 metres across carried on a hexagonal arrangement of piers and Theban granite columns; the mihrab sits in a square projecting apse sheathed in magnificent best-period Iznik tiles ⁴. Freely demonstrates that the east and west side aisles are later additions — the Hadika names the foundation's administrator Pir Ali, and Davut Ağa is plausible — since no architect would willingly design the freestanding respond piers ⁵.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 288–292 (Atik Valide Camii).
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