Mihrimah Sultan Mosque was raised for a princess, and Sinan set it where no arriving traveller could miss it — hard against the old Üsküdar landing. Mihrimah was the only daughter of Suleiman the Magnificent and Hürrem, and the great architect built in her name not one mosque but two. Finished in the 1540s, this one breaks the usual pattern: a single dome braced by three half-domes throws the prayer hall open toward the water, while a deep double porch and a broad overhanging eave wrap its face, the whole building lifted on a terrace above the quay.
Step off the ferry and it is the first stone to greet you. The mosque looms over a square of simit sellers, tea glasses and wheeling pigeons, its wide roof still sheltering whoever waits below. Inside, the light falls gentler than in Sinan's grander domes. A well-loved legend reads its name — sun and moon — as a thread tying it to his other Mihrimah mosque across the city, the two said to catch sunset and moonrise on her birthday. Restored and busy, it stays the anchor of the Asian shore's liveliest square.