Eyüp Sultan Mosque

This guide to Eyüp Sultan Mosque in Istanbul opens around the year 674, when a dying companion of the Prophet Muhammad outside the besieged walls of Constantinople gave his soldiers an unusual order. It follows the siege's failure, the city's Christian centuries that followed, and Sultan Mehmed the Second's 1453 conquest, when he sent his spiritual teacher searching this same hillside. For centuries after, every new Ottoman sultan came to this courtyard before taking the throne.