Researchers
The Blue Mosque
The Sultan Ahmed mosque in Istanbul, called the Blue Mosque for its Iznik tiles: built by Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, Sinan's pupil, between 1609 and 1616, facing Hagia Sophia. It carries six minarets — a number no other mosque dared until the sanctuary at Mecca gained a seventh — and a dome rising on four vast piers wrapped in cascading half-domes that let light in through hundreds of windows. The blue tiles cladding its inner walls are Iznik ceramic's last flowering: tulips, roses and cypresses on blue and white. It stayed the last imperial mosque of classical Ottoman architecture — the seventeenth century's answer to Hagia Sophia's old question. In her court two histories meet: the Byzantine across from her and the Ottoman inside, for she is the answer the Ottomans gave to a thousand years of Hagia Sophia, and the mosque's own language says: we are the heirs here.