Mimar Sinan: Apprentice, Journeyman, Master

Few people have left a deeper mark on a city's skyline than Mimar Sinan, whose domes and slender minarets still define the profile of Istanbul. Yet his career began far from the capital and, for many years, far from architecture. He was born around 1490 in the village of Ağırnas, near Kayseri in central Anatolia, and as a young man was taken into the service of the Ottoman state, where he was trained in the palace system and then joined the army. It was in the army that his talents became apparent. Attached to the Janissary corps as an engineer, Sinan followed military campaigns for the better part of three decades, building bridges to cross rivers, constructing fortifications and devising solutions to the problems that arose along the way. Those years taught him practical lessons that no classroom could have provided: how materials behaved under stress, how structures could be built quickly and how they could be built to last. In 1539, by which time he was nearly fifty, he was appointed chief imperial architect. It was a post he would hold for almost half a century, and the volume of work produced during that period is astonishing. More than three hundred structures are attributed to him, including mosques, schools, hospitals, public baths, aqueducts and bridges. Among them is the long stone bridge at Büyükçekmece, west of Istanbul, which still stands today. Sinan himself judged his career in three stages. The Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul, completed in 1548, he regarded as the work of an apprentice. The Süleymaniye Mosque, finished in 1557 and now one of the city's most admired monuments, represented, in his own view, the work of a qualified craftsman. Only the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, completed in 1574, did he consider his masterpiece. Its great central dome, supported by eight massive piers, creates an airy, uncluttered interior that architects still study with admiration. What distinguishes Sinan is not only the scale of his output but its consistency. He worked with a large team of assistants, many of whom became distinguished builders in their own right, and he paid close attention to harmony between structure and surroundings, so that his buildings seem to rest naturally on the hills where they stand. His modesty is also striking. A man who built so much might be forgiven for boasting; he preferred the humble word "apprentice". He remained active to a remarkable age, serving as chief architect until around 1588, and almost five centuries later his reputation shows no sign of fading.