The sight Edirne is known for is the Selimiye Mosque, which Mimar Sinan built for Selim II and which UNESCO inscribed as World Heritage in 2011. Also in the city centre are the two great mosques that came before it, the nine-domed Eski Cami and the Üç Şerefeli, with the bedesten and the old caravanserais around them. On the bank of the Tunca stands the complex of Bayezid II, whose hospital is now a health museum, and the two rivers are crossed by a series of Ottoman bridges. Further out are the forts of the Balkan War, the long bridge at Uzunköprü, and Enez, Gala Lake and the Gulf of Saros. Each place named here has a guide of its own on the site.
The Selimiye and the museums in its medreses
Sinan was about eighty when he built the Selimiye, and he called it the work of his mastery. It opened on 14 March 1575, after the death of the sultan who ordered it. Inside, one dome covers everything: roughly 31.30 metres wide and 43.28 metres above the floor, it sits on a drum held up by eight great piers, so the whole prayer hall can be taken in at once. In the Tezkiretü'l-Bünyan, the record he left of his own buildings, Sinan wrote that this dome surpassed the one at Hagia Sophia. Each of the four minarets, 70.89 metres tall, has three balconies. Look too at the marble mihrab and minbar, the muezzin's platform on twelve marble columns, and the underglaze tiles made at İznik.
Beneath the terrace runs the arasta, a covered market built under Murad III so that its rents would support the mosque: 256 metres, seventy-three arches, 124 shops. The provincial directorate says the shopkeepers met each morning under its small prayer dome to swear they would trade honestly.
The medreses of the outer courtyard are museums now. The Darülkurra, at the south-west corner, holds the Foundation Works Museum, also listed here as the Selimiye Foundation Museum: objects once given to endowed buildings around Edirne and Kırklareli, sorted into rooms of metalwork, tiles, woodwork, calligraphy, and clocks with astrolabes. Edirne's first museum was founded in 1925 in the Darülhadis, south-east of the mosque, which now shows Turkish and Islamic art; its courtyard holds a monumental yew among fifteenth-century and janissary gravestones. Fifty metres from the eastern gate, the Edirne Museum covers archaeology and ethnography, from Thracian horseman stelae and the figured amphorae of Enez to a reconstructed Edirne bridal room.
Eski Cami, Üç Şerefeli and the old centre
The Eski Cami is older than both. Süleyman Çelebi began it in 1403 and Mehmed I completed it in 1414, and Turkish Wikipedia describes it as the first monumental building in Edirne to survive in its original form. The imams leave its pulpit unused out of respect for Hacı Bayram Veli, who by tradition preached here, and beside the mihrab is a stone believed to come from the Kaaba. The bedesten, which Çelebi Sultan Mehmed founded in 1417–18 to support the Eski Cami, is a hall of fourteen lead-covered domes that still serves as a market; Evliya Çelebi claimed its jewels were worth several Egyptian treasuries.
Murad II built the Üç Şerefeli between 1433 and 1447, at the turn from early to classical Ottoman architecture. Its central dome, twenty-four metres across, stands on six supports in a hall laid out crosswise, a plan Sinan later took further in İstanbul, and the provincial directorate counts its arcaded courtyard as the first in Ottoman building. The minaret with three balconies that names the mosque rises 67.62 metres, each balcony with its own stair. In the Saatli Medrese of the same complex, the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Museum, opened in 2021, tells the life of Mehmed II, who is said to have studied in this building as a prince.
Sinan's caravanserai for Süleyman's grand vizier Rüstem Paşa has been a hotel since its restoration in 1972, work honoured with the Ağa Khan architecture award of 1980, and the Ekmekçizade caravanserai of 1609 houses four museums, one with all 36 Ottoman sultans as silicone figures. The Macedonian Tower is the largest surviving piece of Roman Hadrianopolis. The Great Synagogue, rebuilt after the fire of 1905, reopened on 26 March 2015 after restoration by the state foundations directorate; Turkish Wikipedia calls it the largest synagogue in Türkiye. For old houses, walk the narrow streets of Kaleiçi, and in the Necmi İğe House, which the ministry calls the oldest surviving domestic building in Edirne, a traditional wedding is staged step by step, from the asking of the bride's hand to the henna night.
The Bayezid II complex on the Tunca
At Yeniimaret, beside the Tunca, Bayezid II had the architect Hayreddin build a complex in four years, finished in 1488: mosque, hospital, medical school, guesthouse, soup kitchen, bath and bridge, under close to a hundred domes. The hospital is the reason to go; according to the museum, nothing like it existed anywhere before. Mental illness was treated there with music, running water and scents, and a ten-strong ensemble of musicians and singers came three days each week, choosing a different makam for each complaint. It took in patients for 400 years.
Trakya University turned the hospital and medical school into a health museum, which received a Council of Europe museum award in 2004. Mannequins fill the wards, the six-sided wing for mental illness is arranged around a pool under a lantern dome, and in the medical school a stair climbs to a gallery from which students once watched procedures.
The palace ground and the bridges
Little is left of the Edirne Palace at Sarayiçi, which once covered some 120 hectares beside the Tunca. Among the survivors is the Justice Pavilion, four storeys built by Sinan for Süleyman the Magnificent in 1561, where the Imperial Council once sat. Sinan's Kanuni Bridge joins the palace ground to the city, and the Sarayiçi Balkan Martyrs' Cemetery remembers the 20,000 left there without food or water in 1913.
The rivers give Edirne a run of Ottoman bridges. On the Tunca, the Gazi Mihal Bridge, named after the frontier lord who rebuilt a Byzantine crossing, faces the Gazi Mihal Mosque of 1421; the Yıldırım Bridge was repaired for Süleyman in 1544; and the ten-arched Ekmekçizade Ahmet Paşa Bridge on the Karaağaç road is by Sedefkar Mehmet Ağa, architect of the Sultanahmet mosque. On the Meriç, the 261-metre Meriç Bridge, finished in 1847 under Abdülmecit, is the last Ottoman stone bridge built in the city; on its piers look for two dragons facing each other and three rows of stone bird perches.
Over the Meriç Bridge lies Karaağaç, with picnic grounds along the river. There the three columns of the Lozan Monument commemorate the treaty that brought Karaağaç back into Turkish territory, with the National Struggle and Lozan Museum beside them, and the İlhan Koman Sculpture and Painting Museum, named for the sculptor born in Edirne, is in a historic mansion by the old Karaağaç railway station.
The Balkan War forts
Two sites tell how Edirne was held in the Balkan War. Hıdırlık, built between 1886 and 1888 and the biggest of two dozen gun forts ringing the city, was Şükrü Pasha's headquarters; underground it has eighteen artillery rooms and a 120-metre tunnel, and its museum shows weapons and uniforms of the time. Şükrü Pasha's grave and monument are at Kıyık Tabya, beside a small museum of objects kept by the people of Edirne.
Further out: Uzunköprü, Enez, Gala Lake and the Saros coast
At Uzunköprü, the stone bridge over the Ergene was begun under Murad II in 1427 and opened in 1443; it measures 1,272 metres today, and the provincial directorate ranks it first in length among the world's stone bridges. Of its 174 arches, 164 survive, its piers carry a carved lion and elephant, and it is still in use.
At Enez, where the Meriç reaches the Aegean, the castle encloses a twelfth-century basilica that became a mosque, the Hagia Sophia of Enez; ruined in the 1965 earthquake, it was raised again and opened in 2021 for worship and for visitors. Gala Lake National Park, between Enez and İpsala, has counted 232 bird species, the Dalmatian pelican and the white-tailed eagle among them. On the Gulf of Saros south of Keşan, Gökçetepe Nature Park has six coves along 3.5 kilometres of shore, Danişment is a large campsite under oak, and Erikli has a beach; in Keşan itself, the city museum fills the building townspeople know as the Old Hospital.
