Room 402, Seven Hills Hotel, Sultanahmet, Istanbul; 90-212-516-94-97; sevenhillshotel.com. There are 18 rooms; doubles range from $164 to $273. Room 402, the Saint Sophia Suite, is $355.

Waking up with this view, you might feel as though you've gone back in time—to the year a.d. 537, to be exact. Ancient Constantinople was a stronghold of the sprawling Roman Empire, and Emperor Justinian I had just completed Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya in Turkish)—the Church of the Divine Wisdom. The amber complex would be the seat and symbol of Byzantine Orthodoxy for the next 900 years—until 1453, when Sultan Mehmet II overtook Constantinople and converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Luckily, your present-day wooden hotel is strategically positioned—like a certain Trojan horse—for direct access to the mosque's checkered history. As you walk through the 182-foot-tall basilica's main hall, a statue of the archangel Gabriel stands watch, and Arabic calligraphy crawls along the mosaic walls. During Hagia Sophia's time as the imperial mosque, its Christian treasures were veiled (and sometimes defaced), supplanted by massive Ottoman medallions. Although the silence is overwhelming inside the Church of the Divine Wisdom, outside it's a different story. Sultanahmet, Istanbul's old town, is a cacophony of street vendors and tourists (carpet-haggling at the Grand Bazaar is a favorite local pastime). But late at night, after all the commerce dies down, you'll find yourself gazing through the draped windows of your oak-paneled suite to see Hagia Sophia work her magic under the stars.