Yeni Cami took nearly seventy years to finish, begun by one queen mother and completed by another. Safiye Sultan, mother of Sultan Mehmed III, laid its foundations in a crowded harbour quarter in 1597, but when her son died she lost her standing at court and the half-built shell was left to weather for decades. In the 1660s a second queen mother, Turhan Hatice, revived the project and saw it crowned. Its upkeep was paid by a purpose-built bazaar beside it, the arcade known today as the Spice Bazaar.
You meet it first as a pile of grey domes climbing toward two slim minarets, wedged between the Galata Bridge and the ferry piers. Inside, the roar of Eminönü falls away; light drops through tiers of windows onto Iznik tiles and a wide carpeted floor. Outside, the broad steps have long belonged to pigeons and the people who scatter seed for them. It stays a living mosque and one of the city's most recognised silhouettes, met by nearly everyone who crosses the water to the old town.