From a balcony on the minaret, a muezzin, or crier, calls the faithful to prayer five times each day. Some larger minarets, like the ones at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, have several balconies on every tower where several muezzins can stand and make their call. Minarets come in a variety of shapes. Some are round or square and others are many-sided. Most contain an inner staircase and the majority are built of stone or brick.
Minarets are perhaps the most common feature of Islamic architecture.
The ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt, completed in the 200's BC, may have been the form from which the minaret originally was derived. They are thought to have symbolic meaning as well. And, in some of the great mosques, they are said to represent facts such as the sultan's lineage, etc. Finally, they serve to delineate space, like a boundary marker, similar to the Greek stavros, or cross, found in the countryside. At a symbolic level, then, the minaret occupies two planes, the vertical or spiritual and the horizontal or material.