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Selimiye Mosque
Mimar Sinan, born of Christian parents in Anatolia, lived an astonishingly long life of ninety-nine years (1489-1588), and rose to become the greatest architect in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Taking up architecture exactly half way through his life, Sinan still had time to design countless mosques, palaces, government buildings and bridges. In Istanbul, Sinan’s unrivaled masterpiece is the familiar Süleymaniye Mosque (1550-1557), commissioned by the Sultan, “Süleyman the Magnificent,†known in Turkey as “Kanuni Sultan Süleyman†(or the Law Giver).
Three hundred kilometers (180 miles) west of Istanbul, in the City of Edirne (Roman Adrianople), however, Sinan built his defining masterpiece, the Selimiye Mosque (1569-1575), commissioned by Sultan Selim II, the son of Süleyman According to Sinan’s poet friend, Sai, the great architect had been inspired in designing Selimiye’s dome by the Hagia Sophia, built a thousand years earlier in Constantinople (modern Istanbul). The effect of “a floating dome,†is indeed reminiscent of the floating dome concept that the builders of the Hagia Sophia had also achieved all those years earlier. Among all the domes I've seen from outside and inside - Brunelesschi's (Florence), Saint Peter's (Rome), St. Paul's (London), Hagia Sophia (Istanbul), and the Selimiye, I was personally impressed most by the last two.
Sinan, in designing the four slender minarets flanking the main building, incorporated a pair of spiral staircases that are wound in the same direction, and never cross each other, eliminating the possibility of an individual ascending to become wedged in by someone else descending
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