Selimiye Mosque, Edirne

The Selimiye in Edirne is the great imperial külliye that Sinan built for Selim II in 1569–75; the sultan died a year before its completion, and Sinan himself considered it the crowning achievement of his career, surpassing even his Süleymaniye in Istanbul ¹.

The külliye rises on the Kavak Meydanı platform where Beyazit I had a palace; the mosque and its courtyard — each about 60 by 44 metres — sit within a precinct walled by the medrese, the darülhadis and the Kavaflar Arastası market whose rents supported the foundation ². The courtyard is ringed by a colonnade under nineteen domes with a sixteen-sided white-marble şadırvan at its centre; four minarets at the mosque's corners each rise 70.89 metres — the tallest in Islam per Freely — with three balconies apiece, and the two northern minarets uniquely carry three separate spiral staircases ³.

The prayer hall centres on eight huge ribbed piers bearing the great dome, ringed by small semidomes over the exedrae and a larger semidome over the mihrab apse, the cascading masses giving the mosque its rounded pyramidal profile framed by the minarets ⁴.

• Batch-10 audit: the record previously sourced only Wikidata with minimal prose; the read Freely source was added and the prose rewritten on it.
• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 88–91 (Selimiye).