Selimiye Mosque

The Selimiye Mosque was built in Edirne, a former capital of the Ottoman Empire, on the orders of Sultan Selim II. It was designed by Sinan, the most famous Ottoman architect of the 16th century, who considered the complex his finest work. Construction began in 1568 and ended in the mid-1570s, paid for with spoils from the conquest of Cyprus.

A single great dome on eight pillars, about 31 m across and about 42 m high, crowns the prayer hall; Sinan's biography claims it is six cubits higher and four cubits wider than the dome of Hagia Sophia. Each of the four minarets is 70.89 m tall. Around the mosque stand two madrasas, for Quran recitation and for hadith, an elementary school and a covered market street, and the interior is lined with Iznik tiles from the height of their production.

During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and 1878 some tiles from the sultan's loge were looted and taken to Moscow. Artillery fire damaged the dome during the siege of 1913, and on Atatürk's orders the damage was left unrepaired as a reminder. The mosque was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2011.