Semsi Pasha Mosque, Istanbul

Şemsi Ahmet Pasha Camii is a small but exceptionally pretty mosque at the water's edge in Üsküdar where the Bosphorus meets the Marmara; Sinan built it for vezir Şemsi Ahmet Pasha in A.H. 988 (1580–1), as the historical inscription records ¹.

The founder was a man of great and various learning and a distinguished poet, descended from the Kızıl Ahmedoğulları who once ruled the Anatolian Black Sea coast; a favourite of Süleyman, Selim II and especially Murat III, he held the beylerbeyiliks of Syria, Anatolia and Rumelia in turn. The historian Ali relays his boast to his steward that he avenged his dynasty on the Ottoman house by tempting the sultan himself to sell favours for forty thousand ducats ¹. The mosque is of the simplest type — a square room under a dome on conch squinches — and a handsome green grille separates it from Şemsi's adjoining türbe on the east, which opens into the mosque like a funerary chapel, unique in Ottoman architecture ². The well-proportioned medrese wraps two sides of the courtyard, the third a decorative grilled wall opening onto the quay; the restored külliye now serves as a public library ³.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 312–313 (Şemsi Ahmet Pasha Camii).
• Existing stub (Goodwin-sourced); the read Freely source added.