Sinan's Selimiye Mosque

Sinan was past eighty when construction began on the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, the former Ottoman capital northwest of Istanbul. He had been chief imperial architect for nearly half a century, overseeing hundreds of projects across the empire. He had built bridges, aqueducts, palaces, and dozens of mosques, including the Süleymaniye in Istanbul, completed twenty years earlier. The Selimiye was commissioned by Sultan Selim II, and Sinan later described it in his autobiographical accounts as the work in which he had finally answered the challenge of Hagia Sophia.

That challenge was structural. Hagia Sophia's dome, built a thousand years earlier, spans nearly thirty-two metres and appears to float above the nave, supported on pendentives that mediate between the circular dome and the square plan below. It was the largest dome in the world for centuries, and it remained the reference point for Ottoman architects. Sinan's solution was not to match its diameter — the Selimiye's dome is slightly smaller — but to refine the way the load is carried.

He placed eight piers in an octagonal ring, each one slender enough that the plan reads as open rather than enclosed. The dome rests on these piers through a system of arches and pendentives, but the visual effect is that the weight has been distributed around a perimeter rather than concentrated at four corners. The interior, as a result, is a single volume with no heavy masses interrupting the sightlines. You can stand anywhere in the prayer hall and see the dome overhead without a column blocking the view.

The structure is surrounded by four minarets, each over seventy metres tall, placed at the corners of the mosque's courtyard rather than at the corners of the prayer hall itself. This moves the vertical accents outward, so that the dome remains the central feature when seen from a distance. The minarets are slender and fluted, with three balconies each, and they frame the mosque without competing with it.

The mosque was completed in 1575. Sinan lived another thirteen years, during which he continued to work, but he identified the Selimiye as the culmination of his career. Whether it actually surpasses Hagia Sophia is a matter of definition — the two buildings serve different liturgies and were built with different technologies — but Sinan's claim is that he had solved the problem of the dome more elegantly, with less mass and more light.

The building sits on a hill above Edirne, visible from much of the surrounding plain. The city had been the Ottoman capital before the conquest of Constantinople, and it remained an important administrative and military centre. The mosque was both a religious foundation and a statement of imperial presence in a border region. It included a complex of associated buildings: a school, a library, a covered market, and a hospital, all arranged around the mosque in a planned urban ensemble.