The Süleymaniye is the mosque Süleyman the Magnificent commissioned for himself, and the one his chief architect looked back on as the work of his journeyman years. Sinan raised it between 1551 and 1558, and it stands among the central buildings of classical Ottoman architecture. A visit is more than the prayer hall: behind it lie the tombs of the sultan and Hürrem Sultan, around it the medreses, library and hospital of the complex, and at its corner the small open tomb Sinan designed for himself.
The dome and how it sounds
Over the prayer hall Sinan stacked a single main dome, then a pair of half domes, a pair of quarter domes and ten little ones. The great dome is 27.25 metres in diameter and rises 53 metres above the floor, with 32 windows around its base, and it is carried on four piers whose arches rest on four granite columns. Inside the dome and its corners sit sixty-four clay jars, each half a metre tall, turned with their openings towards the hall; they are the reason the building carries a voice so well.
The hall itself is close to square, 59 metres by 58, about 3,500 square metres in all, and 238 windows light it. Look above the mihrab for the coloured glass made by a master of the period called İbrahim: Sinan said the light that came through it was like the wings of Gabriel. To the right of the müezzins' gallery a section closed by metal screens was the mosque's library until 1918, when its books were moved to a new public library housed in the medreses of the complex.
Four columns and four caliphs
The four granite columns under the arches were collected from Alexandria and Baalbek, from the imperial palace, and from the Column of Marcian here in İstanbul. They measure 9.02 metres in height and 1.14 in width and weigh forty to fifty tonnes apiece, and Sinan compared them to the four caliphs. The calligraphy around the hall is the work of Ahmet Karahisarî and his pupil Hasan Çelebi, and Kazasker Mustafa Efendi added to it later; nearly all of it is drawn from the Qur'an. The şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi is said to have laid the foundation stone.
Courtyard and minarets
The marble courtyard has three gates and a portico of 28 domes on 24 columns: twelve of granite, ten of marble and two of porphyry. The four minarets share ten balconies, three each on two of them and two each on the other pair. The usual reading is that four marks Süleyman as the fourth sultan to reign after the conquest of the city, and ten his place as the tenth sultan of the dynasty.
The tombs of Süleyman and Hürrem
Walk round to the garden behind the mosque, in line with the mihrab wall. The tomb of Süleyman the Magnificent stands there, with that of his wife Hürrem Sultan beside it, and most visitors see the two together. The garden covers some six thousand square metres behind eleven gates. The seven medreses that gave the neighbourhood its name, together with the hospital, the library and the soup kitchen, surround it, all of them paid for by the sultan as parts of one foundation.
Sinan's own tomb
Sinan is not buried with his patron. His tomb stands outside the mosque garden, next to the office of the İstanbul Mufti, and he designed it himself to be plain: a dome on six columns linked by pointed arches, in küfeki stone and marble. A marble slab before the sarcophagus carries a thuluth inscription by the poet Sâi, his biographer. Three other graves share the tomb, one of them that of the architect Ali Talat Bey. From 1538 Sinan held the post of chief imperial architect for forty-nine years, serving Süleyman, then Selim II, then Murad III.
Two more works by Sinan
If one Sinan building leaves you wanting another, two more on the historic peninsula show different sides of him. The Rüstem Paşa Mosque, built for the grand vizier who married Süleyman's daughter Mihrimah Sultan and finished between 1562 and 1564, sits on a raised base over shops and is tiled from floor to the skirts of its dome; its tulip tiles are counted among the best of Ottoman tile work. In the graveyard of the Şehzade Mosque, the octagonal tomb of Şehzade Mehmed is the one Sinan decorated with the most care, with the tomb of Rüstem Paşa beside it.
Each of these places has its own guide on this site with directions and visiting details.
