Standing in the main square of Istanbul, Turkey, the Blue Mosque is not blue on the outside.
But it’s very blue on the inside, with over 20,000 hand-painted blue tiles covering its walls. The Blue Mosque was built in the early 1600s for Sultan Ahmed I. It has six tall, slim towers called minarets. Most mosques have just one, two, or four. At first, the six minarets upset some Muslims who thought Ahmed was trying to make his mosque equal to the Great Mosque of Mecca. How did Ahmed fix the problem? According to legend, he added a seventh minaret to the Great Mosque!
