Blue Mosque, Süleymaniye and other Istanbul mosques: entry, dress code and rules for tourists

Entry to the Blue Mosque, Sultanahmet Camii in Turkish, is free: it has no ticket office, and no public body publishes a tariff for it (as of 7 November 2026). The paid “Blue Mosque tickets” sold online are tours run by private companies, not an entrance fee. It is a working mosque, so tourists go in between the five daily prayers and in clothing that meets mosque etiquette. The same conditions apply at Süleymaniye, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque, Ortaköy and other mosques in Istanbul.

When tourists can go in: prayers and Fridays

A mosque in Turkey is first of all a place of prayer. The five prayers (dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and night) move with the sun, so their times change every day. The Presidency of Religious Affairs of Turkey (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, Diyanet for short) publishes the timetable for Istanbul for any date; the link is in the sources. While a prayer is under way, the hall belongs to the worshippers, so plan your visit between prayers and do not arrive just before the next one begins.

No official tourist visiting hours for the Blue Mosque could be found as of 7 November 2026: neither Diyanet nor the Ministry of Culture and Tourism publishes them, and tourist websites give different times. The latest official decision found dates from March 2013. The Istanbul Directorate of Culture and Tourism, together with the city's mufti, the municipality and the guides' union, then set separate summer and winter tourist hours for the historic mosques and closed the Blue Mosque and the New Mosque (Yeni Cami) in Eminönü to tourists on Fridays until the end of the noon prayer. Whether this decision still applies has not been officially confirmed, so check the prayer timetable and the notice at the entrance.

Tourists can go into a mosque on a Friday too, but midday on that day belongs to the jumu'ah, the main congregational prayer of the week, which draws the largest crowds. If your day in Sultanahmet falls on a Friday, leave the Blue Mosque for the afternoon and spend the morning in the museums nearby.

What to wear to a mosque: what Diyanet says

Diyanet does not issue a separate dress-code poster for tourists. The dress rules for everyone who enters a mosque are set out in the article “Mosque etiquette” (Cami Adabı) in the February 2025 issue of the magazine Diyanet Aylık Dergi. Clothes should be clean, and the parts of the body that ought to be covered should be covered. Men may not come in shorts above the knee; women need a headscarf and clothing suited to a mosque.

That gives a direct answer on shorts: short shorts are not suitable for a mosque. The article does not list items of clothing for women, so a safe choice, in the editors' view, is covered shoulders and legs, a skirt or trousers below the knee and a headscarf in your bag. The article is addressed mainly to believers, but for a tourist the simplest course is to follow the same rules: no other official requirements for visitors' clothing could be found.

Besides clothing, the same article lists a few simple points of mosque etiquette:

• shoes come off at the entrance and go neatly on the shoe rack or, if need be, are carried inside in a bag;
• phones are switched to silent and not used unless necessary;
• inside, people speak quietly and do not run;
• you can sit down and rest wherever you are not in the way of people praying;
• mosques have separate prayer areas for women.

Blue Mosque: where the name comes from and what to see inside

The official name is the Sultanahmet Mosque: it was built by Sultan Ahmed I. According to the Islamic Encyclopedia of the Turkish Diyanet Foundation (TDV), construction began in 1609, prayers were first held here in 1616, and the decoration was finished in 1617. The architect was Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, the chief architect of his day; GoTürkiye, Türkiye's official tourism portal, calls him one of Mimar Sinan's most important pupils. Six minarets set the mosque apart from the city's other imperial mosques.

It is called blue because of its tiles: GoTürkiye puts the building's fame down to its rich blue tiles in the İznik tradition. By the TDV encyclopedia's count there are more than 21,000 of them in more than fifty compositions, mostly with plant motifs, from the workshops of İznik and Kütahya. The tiles cover the walls in the middle section, from the top of the first row of windows to the third; above that begins the kalem işi painted decoration, in which, according to TDV, red and light blue prevail.

The dome, 22.4 metres across, rests on four massive piers known as “elephant feet” (fil ayağı), each five metres in diameter, and is ringed by four half-domes, one on each side. Light comes in through six tiers of windows. At the south-east corner a two-storey sultan's pavilion (hünkâr kasrı) adjoins the mosque: according to TDV, this was the first such pavilion in Ottoman architecture, and today it houses the Carpet and Kilim Museum.

In spring 2023 a five-year restoration led by the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü) came to an end: on 21 April the mosque reopened with Friday prayers. According to the regional director of foundations, over all the years of work the mosque was fully closed for only about five months; the rest of the time it stayed open to people, with restrictions.

GoTürkiye recommends approaching the mosque from the west, from the former Hippodrome (At Meydanı), where the cascade of domes comes into view in full. Nearby stands the türbe (tomb) of Ahmed I. According to TDV, it was completed in 1619, and besides the sultan himself it holds the graves of Kösem Sultan, Osman II and Murad IV.

How the Blue Mosque differs from Hagia Sophia

The two mosques stand on opposite sides of one square, but they come from different eras. Hagia Sophia is a 6th-century Byzantine cathedral that became a mosque after 1453, was turned into a museum in the 20th century and reopened for prayer in 2020. The Blue Mosque was built as a mosque from the start, more than a thousand years after Hagia Sophia, and its interior is made of Ottoman tiles and painting, not Byzantine mosaics.

For a tourist the main difference is the way in. Foreign visitors enter Hagia Sophia by a separate paid route on the gallery floor (details on the place page), while the Blue Mosque has no such split between worshippers and visitors. If you only have time for one, choose by interest: Byzantine history and mosaics mean Hagia Sophia, Ottoman tile art means the Blue Mosque.

Süleymaniye: Mimar Sinan's principal mosque

There is no official ranking of Istanbul's most beautiful mosques. What follows, then, are three mosques that show different sides of the city: Sinan's classical architecture, 16th-century tiles and a 19th-century imperial mosque on the Bosphorus shore.

This mosque was commissioned by Süleyman I himself. The TDV encyclopedia (entry by Selçuk Mülâyim) calls it the largest mosque and complex of the 16th century. The complex sits on the crest of a hill above the Golden Horn and can be seen from Galata and Üsküdar. The dome, 27.4 metres across, rises just over 50 metres above the floor. The four minarets carry ten balconies (şerefe); folk tradition links these numbers to Süleyman being the tenth Ottoman sultan and the fourth after the conquest of Constantinople, but what they meant to Sinan himself, the encyclopedia says, is unknown.

The climb is worth it because the mosque is the centre of a whole quarter. Around it stand madrasas (two of them now house the Süleymaniye Library), a hospital (darüşşifa), a kitchen for the poor (imaret), a hamam and rows of shops, and the small cemetery north of the mosque holds the tomb of Sinan himself. The coloured light on the mihrab wall comes from stained glass that TDV attributes to a master called İbrahim, nicknamed Sarhoş; the same wall carries 16th-century İznik tiles. In the cemetery behind the mosque stand the türbes of Süleyman and Hürrem, which gezdir.me covers in its article on Magnificent Century.

Rüstem Pasha Mosque: tiles above the market

This small mosque in the trading quarter by the Golden Horn was commissioned by the grand vizier Rüstem Pasha, son-in-law of Süleyman I, and, like Süleymaniye, it was designed by Sinan. According to the TDV encyclopedia (entry by Z. Hale Tokay), it was built in 1555–1561, during Rüstem's second term as grand vizier. The mosque is raised above the street: beneath it are the vaults of storerooms and shops, and covered stairways on four sides of the platform lead up to its high courtyard. That makes it easy to walk past on Hasırcılar Street without noticing it.

The tiles are the main reason to come. İznik tiles line the walls of the prayer hall, the piers, the buttresses and the pendentives below the dome, as well as the walls of the portico in front of the entrance (son cemaat yeri), where two large panels hang on either side of the door; the left one, on a dark blue ground, is in better condition. GoTürkiye calls these tiles some of the finest ever made in İznik and points out that red was especially hard for the craftsmen to achieve, so the red details of the ornament repay a close look.

The General Directorate of Foundations began the mosque's latest major restoration in 2016, and in November 2020 it reopened with Friday prayers, TRT Haber reported.

Ortaköy Mosque on the Bosphorus shore

The Ortaköy Mosque, officially the Great Mecidiye Mosque (Büyük Mecidiye Camii), stands right by the water, at the northern edge of the square by the Ortaköy pier in the Beşiktaş district. According to the TDV encyclopedia (entry by Filiz Gündüz), it was built for Sultan Abdülmecid to a design by the architect Nikogos Balyan and completed in 1854. It is a 19th-century imperial mosque with Baroque and Rococo façades, an Empire-style mihrab and a two-storey sultan's pavilion.

Before it, a small mosque from 1721 stood on this spot. The present building was repaired after the 1894 earthquake, restored in the 1960s and again after a fire in 1984. The Bosphorus Bridge passes overhead, so the best view of the mosque is from the pier, where both the dome and the bridge fit into the frame.

How to get to the mosques

• Blue Mosque: tram T1 Kabataş — Bağcılar to the Sultanahmet stop.
• Rüstem Pasha Mosque: the same tram to the Eminönü stop, then on foot into the shopping streets west of the Spice Bazaar.
• Süleymaniye: on foot uphill from the Spice Bazaar or from the Grand Bazaar.
• Ortaköy: tram T1 to the Kabataş terminus, then İETT city buses north along the shore road, or on foot along the Bosphorus past Dolmabahçe Palace and Beşiktaş. Check the line number and the stop in the İETT journey planner: on 7 November 2026 the operator's website did not display the list of stops. From the water, the mosque can be seen from boats sailing along the strait; see the Bosphorus cruise.

To fit several mosques into one day, the order and the walks between them are easy to work out in the gezdir.me route planner.

Photo: Premeditated · CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Courtyard_of_Sultan_Ahmed_I_Mosque_in_blue_(2024).jpg)