Sinan's City: Istanbul from the Grand Bazaar to Süleymaniye

From Constantine's scorched column through the vaults of the Grand Bazaar to the hilltop masterpiece of Mimar Sinan, a glass of boza in Vefa, a mosque of İznik tulips and the Spice Bazaar by the Golden Horn

Istanbul · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Çemberlitaş: The Column of Constantine

   Molla Fenari, Vezirhanı Caddesi, Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Listen · 2:29

   Stand beside the tram tracks and tilt your head back at the tall, sooty column wrapped in iron rings like a barrel. It looks almost shabby among the shop signs and the rattling trams... and it is the oldest monument on this walk by more than a thousand years.

   In the year 330, the emperor Constantine dedicated his new capital on the Bosphorus, and this column stood at the centre of his oval forum. Its drums were cut from porphyry, the purple stone of emperors, quarried in Egypt. On top stood a bronze statue of Constantine himself, crowned with rays like the sun god. In 1106 a storm finally threw that statue down, and the Byzantines put a cross in its place.

   Then there are the legends of what lies underneath. The story goes that Constantine buried a hoard of holy relics at the foot of the column: the adze Noah used to build the ark, the baskets from the miracle of the loaves, and even the Palladium, the wooden statue of Athena that Aeneas was said to have carried from Troy to Rome. Nobody has ever dug to check. Which, if you think about it, is the best way to keep a legend alive.

   Fire was the real enemy. The great blazes that swept this quarter cracked the stone, and it was bound with iron hoops, renewed by the Ottomans, to stop it splitting. That is the Turkish name: Çemberlitaş, the hooped stone. English travellers called it the Burnt Column, and a fire in 1779 left it blacker still. And just behind you, the domes of the Çemberlitaş Hamamı were designed by Mimar Sinan in 1584, the architect whose city you are about to walk through.

   So here is the idea of this walk. You start with Rome's Constantinople and finish with Sinan's İstanbul, and in between, you will climb the third hill and see how the Ottomans rewrote a Byzantine skyline. Cross the tram line, turn into the street that leads north towards the bazaar, and look for a mosque that seems to be made of light.

2. 2. Nuruosmaniye Mosque: Ottoman Baroque

   Molla Fenari, Vezirhanı Caddesi, Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Walk through the gateway into the quiet precinct and notice the light first. After the noise of the street, the stone here is pale, the windows are huge, and the courtyard in front of the prayer hall is not square at all... it curves.

   This is the Nuruosmaniye Mosque, the Light of Osman. Sultan Mahmud I began it in 1748, and his brother Osman III finished it in 1755, giving it his name. By then the empire had been looking west for a generation. Ambassadors came back from Paris with stories of Versailles, and Istanbul fell in love with French and Italian ornament.

   So look at the details. Instead of the stalactite niches of classical Ottoman architecture, you find scrolls, shell shapes, and mouldings that would not look out of place on a church in Vienna. The courtyard bends into a horseshoe, something no earlier imperial mosque had dared. The master builder was a Greek Christian craftsman remembered as Simeon Kalfa, and the result is a mosque built in Baroque, but thinking in Ottoman.

   Not everyone loved it. For a long time historians treated this style as a decline, a loss of nerve after the classical age of Sinan. Today it reads differently: as a confident city absorbing a foreign fashion and making it its own. Stand under the dome, which spans about twenty-five metres, and count the windows. The building was designed to be flooded with daylight, and the name is a pun as much as a dedication.

   And here is the secret of its location. The mosque was placed right against one of the busiest gates of the Grand Bazaar, the Nuruosmaniye Gate. Thousands of traders passed its door every day, and every one of them walked under its name. Walk out through the precinct to that gate now, step inside the bazaar, and follow the main street to the old heart of the market.

3. 3. Grand Bazaar: The Cevahir Bedesten

   Beyazıt, Kalpakçılar Caddesi, 34126 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Step under the painted vaults of the Grand Bazaar and let the street carry you, past gold and carpets and lamps, until the ceiling suddenly changes. The thin plastered arches give way to heavy stone, and the light falls from small high windows. You have just entered the bedesten, the seed from which the whole bazaar grew.

   Only a few years after the conquest of 1453, Mehmed II ordered a fortified hall for the most valuable goods in the city. It is roughly a rectangle of stone, covered by fifteen small domes, with walls thick enough to survive a siege. Its rents went to the religious foundation of Hagia Sophia, newly turned into a mosque, so every jewel sold here helped pay for the great dome down the hill.

   At night the iron doors were locked and guarded. Merchants, widows and even officials deposited cash, deeds and jewellery here, so for centuries the bedesten worked as something close to a bank vault. Its other name is Cevahir Bedesteni, the jewellers' hall, and it still sells antique silver, old coins and the kind of objects that come with stories.

   Around this stone core, the market spread like a city. Workshops, inns called hans, mosques, fountains and lanes were added and roofed over, until the Kapalıçarşı, the covered bazaar, held some sixty streets and several thousand shops. Fires in 1546 and 1660 and an earthquake in 1894 damaged it badly, and every time it was rebuilt. Each trade had its own street, and you can still read them in the names: Kalpakçılar for the hatmakers, Yağlıkçılar for the makers of handkerchiefs.

   Guides like to say you can get lost here for a day. It is true, and it is the point. But we are heading for a quieter kind of treasure. Leave the bedesten by its western door, follow the lanes towards the Beyazıt Gate, and just before it, slip into the little courtyard of the booksellers.

4. 4. Sahaflar Çarşısı: The Booksellers' Bazaar

   Beyazıt, Sahaflar Çarşısı, 34126 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Duck through the low gateway and the roar of the bazaar drops away. You are in a small courtyard under a plane tree, lined with shops stacked to the ceiling with books: Ottoman manuscripts, faded atlases, university textbooks, and paperbacks in five alphabets.

   Sahaf is the Turkish word for a bookseller, and they have gathered beside the Beyazıt Mosque for centuries, close to the colleges and the scholars who were their customers. For most of Ottoman history, a book meant a manuscript, copied by hand by professional scribes. So the booksellers here were also dealers in calligraphy, in illumination, in bindings of tooled leather.

   Now find the bust in the middle of the courtyard. It shows İbrahim Müteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam, who in 1727 received permission to open the first Ottoman printing press using Arabic letters. His first book, a dictionary, came out in 1729. There is a popular myth that the Ottomans simply banned printing. The truth is more interesting: presses printing in Hebrew, Armenian and Greek had worked in the city long before him, and Müteferrika's permit excluded religious texts, which remained the work of calligraphers.

   He printed fewer than twenty titles, but what titles: histories, a geography with maps, a treatise on the reform of the army. His books are now prized collector's items, and a copy sometimes surfaces in a shop around this very courtyard. Think of it... the man who brought print to the empire, watching over a market of the very books he made possible.

   The courtyard has another neighbour. Beyond that gateway on the far side rises the oldest surviving imperial mosque in Istanbul, and next to it a gate that has changed owners more often than any building on this walk. Walk through to the open square, and turn to face the great arch on its northern side.

5. 5. Beyazıt Square, the Mosque & the University Gate

   Beyazıt Meydanı, Beyazıt, 34452 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Face the huge arched gate on the north side of the square, with its slender towers and its Moorish curves. Students stream through it with coffee cups, pigeons wheel overhead, and behind the gate rises a white stone tower like a lighthouse that lost its sea.

   This square has worn many names. In Byzantine Constantinople it was the Forum of Theodosius, one of the great ceremonial squares of the city, and fragments of a triumphal arch still lie by the tram line on the main avenue. After 1453, Mehmed II built his first palace here, the Old Palace, before he moved down to the point of the peninsula. Later the site became the Ministry of War, and this gate was its grand entrance, built in the 1860s.

   Since 1924, the buildings behind it have belonged to Istanbul University. Which is why the square has been a stage for students, protests and politics for a century. The tower behind the gate is the Beyazıt Tower, rebuilt in stone in 1828 as a fire watchtower. From its top, watchmen scanned the wooden city for smoke and signalled with coloured baskets by day and lamps by night.

   Now turn around to the mosque. Sultan Bayezid II, son of the conqueror, built it between 1501 and 1506, and it is the oldest imperial mosque still standing in Istanbul in its original form. Look at how it was designed: a central dome supported by two half-domes, a clear echo of Hagia Sophia, one of the first Ottoman answers to that great church. Sinan, then still a boy in an Anatolian village, would spend his life perfecting that answer.

   Locals once called it the pigeon mosque. Legend says Bayezid bought a single pair of pigeons from a poor widow and gave them to the mosque, and that every pigeon in the courtyard descends from them. Now walk west around the university walls. It is a longer leg, gently uphill, to a little shop that has been serving the same winter drink since 1876.

6. 6. Vefa Bozacısı: A Glass of Boza since 1876

   Molla Hüsrev, Vefa Caddesi No:66, Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Push open the door and step into a room that seems to have stopped its clocks a century ago: dark wood panelling, mirrors, marble counters, and rows of glasses filled with something thick and pale yellow. That is boza, and you are in the Vefa Bozacısı, founded in 1876.

   Boza is made from fermented millet, sweet and sour at once, with the texture of a loose pudding. You drink it cold, sprinkled with cinnamon, and with a handful of roasted chickpeas, leblebi, on top. The fermentation leaves a trace of alcohol, and over the centuries jurists drew a line between the sweet kind and a stronger, sourer brew. The sweet kind is the one that survived.

   On winter evenings in old İstanbul, the boza seller walked the dark streets with a brass jug on his back, calling out a long, drawn-out cry. Grandparents still imitate it for their grandchildren, and in a few neighbourhoods you can still hear a seller doing it for real. It is one of the sounds of this city, like the ferry horn and the call to prayer.

   Now look for the glass in the display case. It is said to be the glass from which Atatürk drank boza here in 1937, and the family who run the shop have kept it ever since. The shop was opened by a man named Hacı Sadık, and it is still in the hands of his descendants, which in a city of fires, earthquakes and endless rebuilding is a kind of miracle.

   So drink up, and taste a recipe that belongs to the same Ottoman world as the mosques around you. Vefa is a neighbourhood of scholars and wooden houses on the slope of the third hill. From the shop, walk north-east, uphill along the quiet lanes, and the four minarets you see ahead will grow larger with every step. They belong to the masterpiece of this walk.

7. 7. Süleymaniye Mosque: Sinan's Masterpiece on the Hill

   Süleymaniye, Prof. Sıddık Sami Onar Caddesi No:1, 34116 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Walk into the arcaded courtyard and stop in the middle. Four minarets stand at its corners, the domes rise in steps towards the sky, and everything around you, every arch and column, is built to the same calm rhythm.

   This is the Süleymaniye, the mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent, built by his chief architect, Mimar Sinan, between 1550 and 1557. The great dome is about twenty-six and a half metres across and its crown rises some fifty-three metres above the floor. Sinan had a model, of course: Hagia Sophia, a thousand years older, down the hill. Here he took its plan of a dome on two half-domes and cleaned it, simplified it, made it Ottoman.

   The legends are part of the building. The four minarets, they say, mark Süleyman as the fourth sultan to rule from this city, and their ten balconies make him the tenth sultan of his dynasty. Inside, ostrich eggs were hung among the lamps, said to keep spiders away. And the story goes that the smoke of hundreds of oil lamps was drawn into a small room above the entrance, where the soot was collected and turned into ink for the calligraphers.

   But a mosque was never just a mosque. Around you stood colleges, a school of medicine, a hospital, a soup kitchen that fed the poor, a hamam, shops, and a library. This whole hilltop was a university town, built on one design. Sinan himself, near the end of his life, called the Şehzade Mosque his apprentice work, the Süleymaniye his journeyman work, and the Selimiye in Edirne his masterpiece. For most people who stand here, that is hard to believe.

   Before you leave, walk to the terrace on the northern side and look down over the Golden Horn to Galata. The hill was chosen so that the mosque would crown the skyline for every ship arriving. Then walk around to the garden behind the prayer hall, where a sultan and the woman he loved lie a few steps apart.

8. 8. The Tombs of Süleyman and Hürrem

   Süleymaniye, Prof. Sıddık Sami Onar Caddesi, 34116 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Step into the walled garden behind the mosque, among the tilted gravestones with their carved turbans, and you will see two octagonal tombs. The large one belongs to Süleyman. The smaller one, a few steps away, belongs to the woman who changed his life.

   She was born in Ruthenia, in what is now Ukraine, and was taken captive in a raid as a girl, then sold into the imperial harem. The Ottomans called her Hürrem, the joyful one. Europe called her Roxelana. Süleyman did something no sultan had done for generations: he freed her and married her. Ambassadors' reports describe a sharp political mind, and the letters the couple exchanged are full of poetry.

   Look inside her tomb if the door is open. The walls are covered with İznik tiles, tulips and carnations, cypresses and blossoming branches, a garden of paradise in glazed clay. She died in 1558, a year after the mosque was completed, and Sinan built her tomb first. So she was the one who waited for him.

   Süleyman died in 1566, on campaign, during the siege of Szigetvár in Hungary. His death was kept secret for weeks so that the army would not panic, and according to tradition his heart and internal organs were buried near the battlefield. His body came home to this tomb. Inside lie also his daughter Mihrimah and two later sultans, Süleyman II and Ahmed II.

   Their story has a dark side, too. Hürrem has been blamed for centuries for the execution of Süleyman's eldest son, Mustafa, in 1553. Historians still argue how much of that is fact and how much is the gossip of foreign courts. Let the garden keep its secrets. Now leave by the corner gate and walk a few steps to the street corner, where the man who built all of this asked to be buried, just outside the walls.

9. 9. The Tomb of Mimar Sinan

   Süleymaniye, Mimar Sinan Caddesi, 34116 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Find the small triangular plot at the corner where two streets meet, and the little marble tomb inside it. No great dome, no tiles, just a marble sarcophagus crowned with a carved turban. This is where the architect of the Süleymaniye chose to lie.

   Sinan was born around 1490 in a Christian village near Kayseri, in central Anatolia. As a young man he was taken in the devşirme, the levy of Christian boys for the sultan's service, converted to Islam and trained as a Janissary. He went on campaign as a military engineer, building bridges and boats, and only around the age of fifty did he become chief architect of the empire.

   And then he built. Mosques, colleges, bridges, baths, aqueducts, caravanserais, kitchens and tombs, more than three hundred works across the empire, from Bosnia to Syria. He served three sultans, Süleyman, Selim II and Murad III, and kept working until he was nearly a hundred years old. He died in 1588, after half a century in the job.

   It is said that this plot was the garden of his own house, given to him so that he could live in the shadow of his greatest building. Near the end, he dictated his memoirs to a poet friend, Sai Mustafa Çelebi, and they read like a working diary: lists of buildings, quarrels with rivals, worries about foundations. A man who moved domes the size of small hills, and who still wanted to be remembered by his list of jobs.

   Stand here a moment and notice the scale. He could have built himself a monument, and instead he chose a corner. Everything around you, from the domes to the street grid, is his tomb in a larger sense. Now head downhill, north-east, along the steep lanes through the old market streets towards the Golden Horn. Watch your step on the slope, and look for a staircase leading up from the street into a mosque you could easily miss.

10. 10. Rüstem Paşa Mosque: A Garden of İznik Tiles

    Rüstem Paşa, Hasırcılar Caddesi, 34116 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

    Climb the narrow stone stairs from the busy market street, and at the top you come out onto a terrace, above the shops, above the porters and the noise. Then you step into the porch... and stop, because the walls are blue.

    The Rüstem Paşa Mosque is covered in İznik tiles, inside and on the porch, more lavishly than any other mosque in the city. Tulips, carnations, hyacinths, pomegranates and vines, in cobalt, turquoise and a brilliant tomato red that İznik potters had only just learned to make. It was built by Sinan around 1561 to 1563, at the very peak of İznik ceramics, and it feels like walking into a jewellery box.

    Why so lavish? Because of the man who paid for it. Rüstem Pasha was Süleyman's grand vizier for many years and the husband of the sultan's daughter Mihrimah. He was also one of the richest men in the empire, a master of the treasury, and not loved for it. He died in 1561, and the mosque was completed after his death.

    His enemies gave him a nickname: the louse of fortune. The story goes that before the wedding, rivals spread a rumour that Rüstem had leprosy, hoping to stop the match. Doctors examined him and found a louse in his clothes, and since people believed that lice never lived on lepers, he was declared healthy. So the insect made his career.

    Now notice the clever engineering. The mosque stands on a platform of vaulted rooms, and those rooms were rented out as shops and storerooms, so the market below paid for the prayer hall above. Religion and commerce are stacked here like floors in a house. Go back down the stairs, turn right along the market street, and follow the smell of cumin and coffee to the last stop, where the bazaar meets the water.

11. 11. Spice Bazaar & the New Mosque

    Rüstem Paşa, Erzak Ambarı Sokak No:92, 34116 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

    Walk into the vaulted hall of the Spice Bazaar and breathe in: cinnamon, saffron, sumac, dried roses, Turkish delight dusted with sugar, and the dark smell of roasting coffee drifting in from the street outside. Then walk out of the far gate, and the courtyard of a great mosque opens in front of you, full of pigeons.

    The two belong together. The mosque is the Yeni Cami, the New Mosque, and the bazaar was built as part of its complex, so the rents of the spice merchants would pay for it. Turks call the market Mısır Çarşısı, the Egyptian Bazaar, usually explained by the goods that arrived through Cairo, or by the Egyptian revenues that helped fund the complex.

    New is a funny word for a mosque begun in 1597. It was started by Safiye Sultan, the powerful mother of Mehmed III. To make room for it, a Jewish Karaite community living on this waterfront was moved elsewhere. When Safiye lost her influence, the work stopped and the walls stood half-built for decades. Another mother of a sultan, Turhan Hatice Sultan, finished it in 1665, with the bazaar rising beside it in the same years. Two women, sixty years apart, gave the city its most famous waterfront silhouette.

    Step into the courtyard and look back up the hill. From here you can trace the whole walk: the minarets of the Süleymaniye on the ridge, the dome of Rüstem Paşa below it, and somewhere behind, the bazaar and the column where you began. Byzantine forum, Ottoman Baroque, Sinan's classical calm, and this late, grand mosque by the sea.

    Now turn towards the water. Ferries hoot, fishermen line the Galata Bridge, and the smell of grilled fish rises from the quay. This is where İstanbul has always come to trade, to pray and to cross. Buy a little bag of something from the bazaar, sit on the steps of the New Mosque, and watch the city do what it has been doing for centuries.