Ottoman Architecture

Ottoman architecture is the building tradition of the Ottoman Empire, developing from the fourteenth century onward and reaching its classical peak in the sixteenth century under the chief court architect Mimar Sinan, who lived from around 1489 to 1588 and served under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Its mosques are organized around a large central dome, typically buttressed by a system of smaller semi domes and pencil thin minarets rising at the building's corners, a structural approach that developed in direct dialogue with the Byzantine dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which the Ottomans had converted into a mosque after their 1453 conquest of the city. Sinan designed several hundred buildings over his long career, and he himself considered the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, completed in 1575 for Sultan Selim II, to be his masterpiece, its single vast dome engineered to rival and, in his own assessment, surpass the span of Hagia Sophia. His earlier Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, built for Suleiman the Magnificent, is another major surviving example of the style's mature, monumental domed form.