The Üç Şerefeli Mosque — its name means "three-balconied," after the three balconies on its tallest minaret — was completed in 1447 and represents a pivotal experiment in Ottoman architecture. It stands between the earlier multi-domed mosques like the Eski Cami and the grand single-domed imperial mosques that would come later. Here the architects attempted to cover a much wider space with a single central dome, flanked by two semi-domes — an approach that had not been tried at this scale before. The result was imperfect by the standards of what Sinan would later achieve, but the ambition was entirely new.
The four minarets are each different, a deliberate display of variety: the tallest has three balconies, another has two, and the remaining two have one each. The courtyard, with its elegant arcaded portico and central ablution fountain, is one of the most pleasant spaces in Edirne to simply sit. The mosque sits close to the Eski Cami and the Ali Pasha Bazaar, making it easy to visit all three in a single walk through the old town.