Nakkaş Osman, c. 1579 — painted in his lifetime. He holds a wooden cubit rule.
Mimar Sinan
c. 1489 — 1588
He was a soldier until fifty. Then he spent half a century teaching stone to stand up like sky.
In the summer of 1538 the Ottoman army stalled at the Prut, in Moldavia. The ground was swamp; the first bridge attempt had collapsed into it. A fifty-year-old officer of the Janissary corps — a man conscripted as a boy, who had spent a quarter-century marching from Belgrade to Baghdad — said he could do it. As his biographer tells it, he threw a timber crossing over the river in thirteen days, and the army walked over on the last day of August. The following year Suleiman the Magnificent made him mimarbaşı, chief architect of the empire.
He was Sinan, born a Christian villager in the stone country of Cappadocia and taken from it by the child-levy. He held the post for forty-nine years, through three sultans, and did not stop until he was ninety-nine. The catalogue his biographer set down at the end lists 374 buildings — mosques, colleges, hospitals, soup kitchens, bridges, aqueducts, baths. His near-contemporary Michelangelo, who died in 1564, is a household name in half the world. Sinan, who outbuilt him many times over, mostly is not.
Soldier, engineer, architect
The lifeline
c. 1489
Born in Ağırnas, a stone-carving village near Kayseri, to a Christian family
1512
Taken in the devşirme, the imperial child-levy, and trained as a Janissary
1535
Builds ships on Lake Van to ferry the army and its guns during the Persian campaign
1538
Bridges the Prut in thirteen days; the army crosses on 31 August
1539
Appointed chief royal architect at about fifty — the career begins
1588
Dies on 17 July, aged about 99, and is buried in a tomb of his own design
By the numbers
The measure of him
374
Structures listed in the catalogue dictated near the end of his life
49
Years as chief royal architect, serving three sultans in succession
31.28 m
The clear span of the Selimiye dome — his answer to Hagia Sophia
~99
Years he lived. He finished his masterpiece at about eighty-six
What he raised
The work
1543–48
The Şehzade Mosque, Istanbul. A memorial to Suleiman's dead son, and a first full test of the four-half-dome plan. Sinan called it his apprentice work.
1550–57
The Süleymaniye, Istanbul. A dome 26.5 m across and 53 m above the floor, at the centre of a whole city quarter: four colleges, a medical school, a hospital, a soup kitchen, a caravanserai, baths and shops. He called it his journeyman work.
1550s–60s
The Mağlova Aqueduct. Two tiers of arches 257 m long and 35 m high, striding the Alibey valley — part of the water system he built to keep Istanbul drinking.
1560s
The Büyükçekmece Bridge. Nearly 635 m of causeway in four linked spans, carrying the imperial road out of Istanbul across a marshy lagoon.
1568–75
The Selimiye Mosque, Edirne. One dome, 31.28 m wide and 42 m high, on eight piers, with four minarets of 70.89 m. He called it his masterwork; UNESCO inscribed it in 2011.
92 great mosques52 small mosques55 colleges48 bathhouses36 palaces20 caravanserais20 tombs17 soup kitchens10 bridges7 Qur'an schools6 aqueducts3 hospitals
Honoured at home, left out of the canon
Recognition
In his lifetime
Head of the imperial corps of architects — a salaried officer of the state, not a celebrated individual genius
He had to dictate his own life story to the poet Sâi Mustafa Çelebi to have it recorded at all
Europe was writing the history of architecture at exactly this moment, and wrote him out of it
Even the year of his birth was never fixed; it is still given as c. 1488, 1489 or 1490
Today
The Selimiye complex at Edirne became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011
Istanbul's fine-arts university carries his name, as do streets in a dozen cities
His mosques still open five times a day; his bridges and aqueducts still carry load
Engineers study his foundations and dome geometry for how well they survive earthquakes
The place that made him
Ağırnas, in Cappadocia
He came from volcanic country — soft tuff that people had been cutting into houses, churches and whole underground cities for a thousand years before he was born. Carving stone was not an art there; it was how you got a roof. He never forgot the village: in 1573, when he was the most powerful builder in the empire, he petitioned the sultan to spare his relatives from forced resettlement to newly conquered Cyprus, and the decree survives.
c. 1489
The year he was born there, in a house cut partly into the rock
~23
His age when the child-levy took him to Istanbul, never to live there again
1573
The year his petition spared his kin from deportation to Cyprus
"In this mosque I have erected a dome six cubits higher and four cubits wider than the dome of Hagia Sophia."
— Sinan, on the Selimiye as recorded by his biographer Sâi Mustafa Çelebi
