The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis
Authors: Edward Hollis
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of his successors to do the same. In 1595, Murad III had a domed tomb built in the garden, and soon afterward Muhammad III added another one. In 1622, Mustapha I had the old Christian baptistery converted into his final resting place, and a few decades later the mortal remains of the sultan Ibrahim joined him there under its ancient dome. Today, the great dome of Ayasofya rises above a veritable town of its smaller imitators.
And as Constantinople turned into Istanbul, and Hagia Sophia into Ayasofya, so also the tribe of Osman resembled less and less the wild horsemen from whom they were descended, and became more and more like the Romans whose empire they had appropriated. Before theconquest of Constantinople, the mosques of the Turks had been central Asian in character. A typical prayer hall in these mosques was no more elaborate than the open courtyard of a caravansary, and it was entered through a high tiled door flanked by minarets, which resembled a beautiful carpet slung between two lances. These buildings were designed to recall the simple house of mud and timber in Medina where Muhammad had preached while he was in exile. But the prayer hall of the “Fatih” mosque—the Mosque of Victory—that Mehmet constructed in Istanbul after his conquest was not a courtyard but a gigantic interior. In it, four colossal piers supported four arches, which supported a magnificent dome pierced with windows and bathed in light, and the building resembled nothing so much as the great church of the Romans.
It was a soldier in the service of the sultan Suleyman who brought this new architecture, appropriated from the ancient splendors of Constantinople, to perfection. Sinan was a Janissary, one of the murderous personal guard of the sultan, but his superiors took notice of his great talent for all forms of drawing, building, and engineering. After his military service was over, Sinan entered the ministry of works, and in 1538 he was made chief architect to the sultan himself.
Sinan’s endless ingenuity was applied to bridges and aqueducts, fortifications and theology schools, tombs and gardens. Most beautifully of all, Sinan designed mosques, and most magnificent of these was the one he built for the sultan Suleyman. The Suleymaniye Mosque was built, like Hagia Sophia, at tremendous speed: it took just seven years between the laying out of the foundations to the topping out of the dome in 1557. (Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, begun at around the same time, took some two centuries to complete.) To build his mosque, Sinan ransacked the antiquities of Istanbul: supporting the aisles of its interior are columns from the old imperial box in the Hippodrome, from the temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, and from a monument to the emperor Arcadius in the ancient Forum.
But Sinan appropriated more than antique fragments, for the very form of the Suleymaniye Mosque stole away and transmogrified the form of Ayasofya. Its vast interior is sheltered by a dome some eighty feet in diameter, and, as in Ayasofya, this dome is supported on four arches. As they are in Ayasofya, the side arches are closed with ranksof arched windows and marble colonnades, while the two end arches are closed with semidomes that are supported on three more semidomes themselves.
But the Suleymaniye Mosque differed from Ayasofya in one crucial respect: its mihrab lay in the dead center of the easternmost apse, precisely on the line of symmetry of the whole building. Unlike in Ayasofya, all the parts of the Suleymaniye Mosque—and the gardens all around it, and the colleges and pilgrims’ rests that surrounded the gardens, and the tomb of Suleyman himself—were oriented to the black stone in Mecca.
In his later years, Sinan dismissed the Suleymaniye as an “apprentice work”; and while it was vast and beautiful, it was merely the overture to a long and prolific career. Istanbul is studded with the mosques of Sinan, from the Rüstem Pasha Mosque in the bazaar,
And as Constantinople turned into Istanbul, and Hagia Sophia into Ayasofya, so also the tribe of Osman resembled less and less the wild horsemen from whom they were descended, and became more and more like the Romans whose empire they had appropriated. Before theconquest of Constantinople, the mosques of the Turks had been central Asian in character. A typical prayer hall in these mosques was no more elaborate than the open courtyard of a caravansary, and it was entered through a high tiled door flanked by minarets, which resembled a beautiful carpet slung between two lances. These buildings were designed to recall the simple house of mud and timber in Medina where Muhammad had preached while he was in exile. But the prayer hall of the “Fatih” mosque—the Mosque of Victory—that Mehmet constructed in Istanbul after his conquest was not a courtyard but a gigantic interior. In it, four colossal piers supported four arches, which supported a magnificent dome pierced with windows and bathed in light, and the building resembled nothing so much as the great church of the Romans.
It was a soldier in the service of the sultan Suleyman who brought this new architecture, appropriated from the ancient splendors of Constantinople, to perfection. Sinan was a Janissary, one of the murderous personal guard of the sultan, but his superiors took notice of his great talent for all forms of drawing, building, and engineering. After his military service was over, Sinan entered the ministry of works, and in 1538 he was made chief architect to the sultan himself.
Sinan’s endless ingenuity was applied to bridges and aqueducts, fortifications and theology schools, tombs and gardens. Most beautifully of all, Sinan designed mosques, and most magnificent of these was the one he built for the sultan Suleyman. The Suleymaniye Mosque was built, like Hagia Sophia, at tremendous speed: it took just seven years between the laying out of the foundations to the topping out of the dome in 1557. (Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, begun at around the same time, took some two centuries to complete.) To build his mosque, Sinan ransacked the antiquities of Istanbul: supporting the aisles of its interior are columns from the old imperial box in the Hippodrome, from the temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, and from a monument to the emperor Arcadius in the ancient Forum.
But Sinan appropriated more than antique fragments, for the very form of the Suleymaniye Mosque stole away and transmogrified the form of Ayasofya. Its vast interior is sheltered by a dome some eighty feet in diameter, and, as in Ayasofya, this dome is supported on four arches. As they are in Ayasofya, the side arches are closed with ranksof arched windows and marble colonnades, while the two end arches are closed with semidomes that are supported on three more semidomes themselves.
But the Suleymaniye Mosque differed from Ayasofya in one crucial respect: its mihrab lay in the dead center of the easternmost apse, precisely on the line of symmetry of the whole building. Unlike in Ayasofya, all the parts of the Suleymaniye Mosque—and the gardens all around it, and the colleges and pilgrims’ rests that surrounded the gardens, and the tomb of Suleyman himself—were oriented to the black stone in Mecca.
In his later years, Sinan dismissed the Suleymaniye as an “apprentice work”; and while it was vast and beautiful, it was merely the overture to a long and prolific career. Istanbul is studded with the mosques of Sinan, from the Rüstem Pasha Mosque in the bazaar,
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