Mihrimah Sultan Mosque, Üsküdar

Mihrimah Sultan, Süleyman the Magnificent's only daughter, commissioned two mosques from Sinan under her own name — one at Edirnekapı, on the city's western land walls, and this one at Üsküdar, on the Bosphorus shore where the Asian side's ferries still dock. Built in the late 1540s, early in the period Sinan later called his apprenticeship, the mosque is markedly smaller and simpler than his later imperial commissions: a square prayer hall under a single dome about eleven metres across, its drum lit by rings of stacked windows rather than the cascading semi-domes he would use at Süleymaniye a decade later. A single slender minaret stands at one corner rather than the paired or quadruple minarets of the sultans' own mosques, a scale appropriate to a princess's rather than a sultan's foundation. It remains in daily use, overlooking Üsküdar's ferry terminal and one of the busiest crossing points on the Bosphorus.