People
Architects
Mimar Sinan and the builders of the Ottoman golden age, through the mosques and aqueducts you can visit.
Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Person · Istanbul
Mimar Sinan
The village boy from Anatolia who became the Ottoman Empire's chief architect for fifty years and shaped the skyline of Istanbul.
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Person · Aegean
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About this section
Architects
The great architects of the Ottoman Empire worked for the sultan’s court, and one name stands above the rest. Mimar Sinan was chief architect for almost fifty years, and his office designed or supervised several hundred buildings.
Tradition says Sinan named three mosques as the stages of his career. The Şehzade Mosque was his apprentice work, the Süleymaniye his journeyman piece and the Selimiye in Edirne his masterpiece, built when he was around eighty.
Other architects worked in his office, but his own smaller works are just as rewarding. The Rüstem Pasha Mosque glows with İznik tiles, and the Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque climbs a slope below the Hippodrome. He also built water lines, so the Mağlova Aqueduct belongs to his work as well.
The Selimiye and its complex became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011. Visit two or three of these buildings in one day, and you will start to see how Sinan solved the same problem of dome and light in new ways.
