Suleymaniye Mosque: Sinan's Imperial Masterpiece in Istanbul

The Suleymaniye Mosque is the great imperial mosque built in Istanbul for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent between 1550 and 1557. Designed by the court architect Mimar Sinan, it crowns the city’s third hill above the Golden Horn and stands at the centre of a large complex of schools, charitable institutions and tombs. It is widely regarded as the finest monument of the Ottoman classical age and a defining feature of the Istanbul skyline.

Background

By 1550 Suleiman the Magnificent had ruled for thirty years. His armies had taken Belgrade, Rhodes, Buda and Baghdad, and his reign was presented as a golden age of law and order. A new mosque complex on the scale of those of his predecessors was a natural way to proclaim that achievement.

Ottoman sultans traditionally funded such complexes from the spoils of war, and they were run by a charitable endowment (waqf) that owned property and paid salaries. Suleiman chose a commanding site on the third hill, partly occupied by the grounds of the Old Palace. The commission went to Mimar Sinan, chief architect since 1538, who had already built the Sehzade Mosque in memory of the sultan’s son Mehmed.

Construction, 1550-1557

Work began in 1550, and the foundation stone ceremony is generally dated to June of that year. Surviving account books show a workforce of several thousand people, a mix of paid craftsmen, labourers and men drawn from the army and navy. Materials came from across the empire, including marble columns and stone reused from older buildings.

The mosque was completed and opened in 1557. The surrounding institutions were finished in stages, and the tombs were added after the deaths of Hurrem Sultan in 1558 and Suleiman in 1566.

Design

Sinan took the structure of Hagia Sophia, with a central dome flanked by two half-domes on the main axis, and refined it. The dome, about 26.5 metres across, rises roughly 53 metres above the floor and rests on four massive piers. The side walls are carried on arches with tympana pierced by many windows, so the interior is flooded with light.

The prayer hall is preceded by a courtyard with a colonnade of granite and marble columns and a fountain. Four minarets stand at the corners of the courtyard, two tall and two shorter, with ten balconies between them. A traditional reading holds that the four minarets mark Suleiman as the fourth sultan since the conquest of Constantinople and the ten balconies as the tenth sultan of the dynasty.

The interior decoration is restrained by later standards. Calligraphy by the leading scribe Ahmed Karahisari and his pupil Hasan Celebi runs around the walls and dome. Stained glass windows on the qibla wall, attributed to a craftsman known as Ibrahim the Drunkard, and Iznik tiles around the mihrab add colour.

The kulliye: a city within the city

The mosque was the heart of a kulliye, a planned complex of public buildings arranged around it on terraces. The Suleymaniye complex included:

• four colleges (madrasas) for higher religious and legal studies, and a separate school for the study of Hadith;
• a medical school and a hospital (darussifa);
• a public kitchen (imaret) that fed students, staff and the poor;
• a caravanserai for travellers, a bathhouse (hamam), and a primary school;
• rows of shops whose rents helped fund the endowment.

In the walled garden behind the mosque stand the octagonal tombs of Suleiman and Hurrem Sultan. Suleiman’s tomb later also received the bodies of Suleiman II and Ahmed II. Sinan, who died in 1588, built himself a small tomb at the northern corner of the complex, near the house where he had lived.

Key people

Mimar Sinan (c. 1490-1588) was a Janissary engineer who became the greatest Ottoman architect, credited with hundreds of buildings. In the memoirs he dictated late in life, he called the Suleymaniye the work of his journeyman years, reserving the title of masterpiece for the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne.

Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520-66) paid for the complex and closely followed its progress. Its endowment deed set out how its staff, students and charities were to be supported.

Hurrem Sultan (Roxelana), Suleiman’s wife and one of the most powerful women in Ottoman history, died in 1558. Her tomb, decorated with fine Iznik tiles, stands beside that of her husband.

Damage and restoration

The building has survived fires and earthquakes that struck Istanbul repeatedly. A great fire in 1660 damaged the mosque, and it was restored under Sultan Mehmed IV. Earthquakes, notably that of 1766, required further repairs, and in the nineteenth century parts of the interior were repainted in a European style.

During the First World War the courtyard was used as an ammunition store, and a fire in 1918 caused serious damage. Twentieth-century restorations removed much later paint, and a major restoration completed in 2010 repaired the structure, the courtyard and decoration. The mosque forms part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.

Influence and place in the city

The Suleymaniye set the pattern for later imperial mosques in Istanbul. The Sultan Ahmed (Blue) Mosque, built in 1609-1616 by Sinan’s pupil Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, follows the same principle of a central dome buttressed by half-domes, although it expands to four half-domes. Many smaller mosques across the empire, from the Balkans to Syria, borrowed details from Sinan’s design.

The complex also shaped the life of its neighbourhood for centuries. Its colleges trained judges, teachers and scholars, and its library, the Suleymaniye Library, now houses one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in the world, including tens of thousands of volumes gathered from many older libraries.

Seen from the Golden Horn and the Galata side of the city, the mosque’s stepped domes and minarets form one of the best-known silhouettes in Istanbul. Sinan placed the building so that it would dominate the view from the water, and its terraces were designed to give wide views back over the harbour and the Bosphorus.

Myths and facts

Story: the soot room. It is often said that Sinan designed the air flow so that smoke from the many oil lamps collected in a small chamber, where the soot was gathered to make ink. A soot chamber does exist above the entrance, but how well the system worked is not documented in detail.

Story: acoustic jars. Guides often say that Sinan set hollow clay pots into the dome to improve the sound. Such resonators are known from Ottoman buildings, but the number and effect in this mosque are uncertain.

Timeline

• 1538: Sinan becomes chief court architect.
• 1550: Construction of the Suleymaniye begins.
• 1557: The mosque is completed and opened.
• 1558: Death of Hurrem Sultan; her tomb is built in the mosque garden.
• 1566: Suleiman dies on campaign at Szigetvar and is buried at the Suleymaniye.
• 1588: Sinan dies and is buried in his own tomb at the complex.
• 1660: A great fire damages the mosque; restoration follows.
• 1985: Inscribed as part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul World Heritage Site.
• 2010: A major restoration is completed.

Why it matters

The Suleymaniye shows the Ottoman Empire at the height of its wealth and confidence, expressed in stone. As a working mosque, school, hospital and kitchen, it also shows how Ottoman rulers used architecture and charity to bind the capital’s people to the dynasty.