This unassuming little mosque is easy to miss, but may come as a welcome respite from the tempo of modern Istanbul. Here, once you enter an ordinary archway and leave behind the crowds of the street below, you are carried away into the flow of another time. The mosque was built in 1561 by the great imperial architect Mimar Sinan, and is a perfect illustration of the city’s paradoxical beauty- the fast-paced bustle of modernity coexisting with an other-worldly spiritual simplicity.