The Blue Mosque gets its nickname from an interior most visitors never look at closely enough to count, and it is still an active mosque despite the crowds.
More than twenty thousand tiles
The mosque's interior is lined with over twenty thousand handmade Iznik tiles, produced in the renowned tile-making town of Iznik, arranged in floral and geometric patterns dominated by blue tones that give the building its popular English name, a nickname not used in Turkish, where it is known by the sultan who commissioned it. The tiles' scale and quality are cited as marking a peak in Iznik ceramic production before the industry's later decline.
Designed by Sinan's student
The mosque was designed by Sedefkar Mehmed Aga, who trained under the great Ottoman architect Sinan, and its six minarets, unusual for a mosque of this scale, prompted the widely repeated story that an extra minaret was subsequently added to the Grand Mosque in Mecca to preserve that site's numerical primacy.
Worship first, tourism worked around it
Despite receiving enormous numbers of visitors annually, the mosque remains an active place of worship, closing to non-worshipping tourists during the five daily prayer times and requiring modest dress and head coverings for visitors, a working arrangement that keeps religious use and tourism functioning in the same space without one displacing the other.