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The mosques of Edirne
A charming but under-visited town that boasts one of the Ottoman Empire's finest buildings
Edirne is a charmingly slow-paced town, famed in Turkey for its annual oil wrestling championship, its cigercisi (fried calf's liver) and its historic mosques," says Edward Reeves in the Sunday Telegraph.
Just a two-hour drive from Istanbul, by the Greek border, it receives far less than its fair share of visitors. Of its great mosques, the most impressive is Selimiye Cami, "the masterpiece of Mimar Sinan, the great architect of the Ottoman glory years".
It is a "sublime, wonderfully serene building" deliberately designed to outdo the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul: its vast, unsupported dome is slightly larger than the one that "the infidel Byzantines" managed to construct.
Peten Travels (00 90 212 248 9636) can arrange individual trips. ·
