Selimiye Mosque

Sinan was approaching eighty when Selim II gave him Edirne, the old Ottoman capital, and a hilltop above it. He answered with the building he had been working towards for forty years. Eight piers set in an octagon inside a square hall take the whole 31.3-metre dome directly, on arches, rather than through the cascade of half-domes that steadies the Süleymaniye; the buttresses that resist the outward thrust are folded into the thickness of the outer walls, which are therefore free to be cut through with windows at every level. The result is a single undivided room, lit all round, with the muezzin’s platform standing free at its centre and İznik tilework concentrated at the mihrab. Four minarets, each nearly seventy-one metres, hold the mass down at the corners. Sinan called it his masterpiece; his biography claims for it a dome higher and wider than Hagia Sophia’s. UNESCO inscribed the mosque and its social complex in 2011.