Imperial Ottoman

Society & Culture · In depth

Ottoman Architecture: Mosques, Palaces, and the Sinan Tradition

An overview of Ottoman architecture — the classical idiom of Mimar Sinan, the külliye complex, imperial palaces, and the Ottoman Baroque phase of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Ottoman Architecture

For more than five centuries, Ottoman architecture shaped the skylines of three continents. Its domes, minarets, and cascading half-domes became the visual signature of the empire, and its monuments — from the Süleymaniye in Istanbul to the Süleymaniye in Edirne, from the imperial palaces of Istanbul to the bridges of Mostar — defined the cities in which millions of Ottomans lived, worked, prayed, and traded. This article surveys the main forms, periods, and architects of the tradition, and it complements the broader overview of Ottoman society and culture.

The classical tradition

Ottoman architecture matured in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into what is now called the classical style. The key monument of the early classical period is the Fatih Mosque (1463–1470) in Istanbul, built by the architect Atik Sinan on the ruins of the Church of the Holy Apostles for Sultan Mehmed II. The Fatih complex was the first great imperial külliye — a combination of mosque, medrese, hospital, soup kitchen, library, bath, and caravanserai — and it set the template for the imperial religious foundations that followed.

The classical idiom reached its full maturity in the work of Mimar Sinan (c. 1488/1490–1588), the chief architect of Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors. Drawing on the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, on Seljuk and Mamluk precedents in Anatolia and Egypt, and on the engineering traditions of the Ottoman carpentry shops, Sinan produced a vocabulary of vast central domes, slender pencil minarets, cascading semi-domes, and spacious, light-filled interiors that the empire’s later architects sought to emulate for generations. Sinan’s wider contribution to the Ottoman society and culture of the classical age is treated in the main overview.

The three works that Sinan himself considered his masterpieces are the Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul (1548), the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul (1557), and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1574). The Selimiye, in particular, is often described as the finest classical Ottoman mosque, with a single great dome nearly as wide as that of Hagia Sophia rising on eight massive piers.

The mosque

The Ottoman mosque was, in form, an octagonal or square prayer hall roofed by a central dome, generally preceded by a courtyard with a fountain for ritual ablutions. The walls of the prayer hall were pierced with windows in tiers, and the interior was plastered and painted with calligraphic inscriptions of the Qur’an, geometric and arabesque ornament, and stylized floral and cloud-band designs. The mihrab niche indicated the direction of Mecca, and the minbar — a tall pulpit — stood to the right of the mihrab.

The most distinctive external feature of the Ottoman imperial mosque was the pencil minaret, a tall, fluted, sharply pointed tower of white cut stone, often capped with a conical lead cap. A mosque of imperial foundation typically had four minarets; a mosque founded by a grand vizier typically had two; a neighborhood mosque had one, or none at all.

The smaller neighborhood mosque, or mescid, was the most common form of religious building in the empire. It was usually a simple square, domed structure with one or two windows, no minbar, and no pulpit — a place for the five daily prayers and little more. In Istanbul alone there were several thousand such neighborhood mosques by the seventeenth century.

The külliye

The imperial külliye was the most ambitious form of Ottoman religious patronage. It was a complex of buildings grouped around a central mosque, financed by an evkaf — a pious endowment — and administered as a single institution. The standard külliye included:

  • the mosque itself;
  • one or more medreses for higher religious education;
  • a darüşşifa (hospital) and tabhane (guesthouse);
  • a hastane (medical school) and eczane (pharmacy);
  • an imaret (soup kitchen) that fed the poor, the students, and the travelers of the neighborhood;
  • a hamam for the use of the staff and the public;
  • a kervansaray (caravanserai) for the lodging of merchants and their goods;
  • a sıbyan mektebi (primary school);
  • and sometimes a library, a fountain, a clock tower, or a türbe (mausoleum) for the founder.

The Süleymaniye Külliyesi, built by Sinan between 1550 and 1557, is the most complete surviving example. The Atatürk Bulvarı, the modern avenue that runs along the south side of the complex, hides most of the külliye from the casual visitor, but the mosque, the four medreses, the hospital, the caravanserai, the hamam, and the imaret are all still standing, and the complex is still in use as a place of prayer and learning.

Palaces

The sultans had many residences, but the most important were the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, the Edirne Palace in Edirne, and the Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus, together with a series of imperial waterside pavilions, hunting lodges, and seasonal palaces scattered across Thrace and Anatolia.

The Topkapı Palace was the main imperial residence from 1465 to 1856, and it was the political and ceremonial center of the empire for almost four centuries. Its plan, organized into four courtyards, mixed private apartments, government offices, the treasury, the library, the harem, and the barracks of the inner palace service. The Harem — the household of the sultan, his mother, his consorts, and his children — occupied a separate walled quarter at the back of the palace, and it had its own courtyards, its own bath, its own school, and its own mosque. The daily routines of this quarter are described more fully in the article on life in the imperial harem, and the broader household and the dynasty in the article on the Ottoman family and the imperial harem.

The Dolmabahçe Palace, completed in 1856, replaced Topkapı as the principal imperial residence and signaled the empire’s adoption of European architectural forms. The building — a long Baroque–Rococo palace on the Bosphorus, designed by the Balyan family of architects — is one of the largest palaces in the world, and its crystal staircase, its huge Bohemian crystal chandelier, and its Hereke carpets and silk wall coverings represent a very different aesthetic from the austere classical Ottoman style of Sinan. The decorative interiors of the palace are treated in the article on Ottoman art and music, and the wider imperial household in the Ottoman family and the imperial harem.

Bridges, fountains, bazaars, and infrastructure

Sinan and his successors designed hundreds of civil engineering works. The bridge of Büyükçekmece (1567), the bridge of Drina at Višegrad (1577), and the Mostar bridge (1557–1566) in Herzegovina are the most famous. These long, multi-arched stone bridges carried imperial roads across the rivers of the Balkans and Anatolia, and they were built to last: the Mostar bridge, destroyed in 1993, was rebuilt in 2004 using the original Ottoman plans and many of the original stones.

The Ottoman han (caravanserai) was a related building type, providing lodging for merchants and their goods along the imperial road. The great hans of Bursa, of the Anatolian caravan routes, and of the spice road through Aleppo and Damascus are some of the most impressive surviving examples of the type, and they served the merchants whose wares fed the imperial kitchen of the Ottoman cuisine tradition. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, founded in the fifteenth century and enlarged over the centuries, is the largest covered market in the world, and its sixty-plus streets, four thousand shops, mosques, hamams, fountains, and medreses are a complete example of the Ottoman commercial district.

The sebil and the çeşme — the public fountain and the public drinking fountain — were also a distinctive form of Ottoman public architecture. The fountain was often a small freestanding marble pavilion with grilles through which a servant could pour cups of water for the public, and dozens of them stood on the streets of every major city. The türbe — the mausoleum of a sultan, a grandee, or a saint — was a further important form. The most famous example is the Tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent beside the Süleymaniye, but many provincial towns have their own türbe, often the most distinctive building in the local skyline.

Provincial and imperial-influenced architecture

The classical style of Sinan was rapidly exported to the provinces. The Ottomans’ new mosques in the Balkans, in Syria, in Egypt, in Iraq, in the Hejaz, and in the Maghreb followed the central-domed Ottoman model, with regional variations. The mosques of the Sancaklar Region in Bosnia, the Selimiye in Edirne, the Süleymaniye in Damascus, the Sokollu Mehmed Pasha mosques in Istanbul and Edirne, and the Banya Bashi mosque in Sofia are all descendants of the Sinan tradition.

In some places the Ottoman model was adapted to local conditions. In the Mamluk and Arab provinces, the new Ottoman mosques often used local stone, local building techniques, and a more lavish use of marble and tile; in the Balkans, by contrast, the classical Ottoman plan was adopted almost unchanged, since it was felt to mark the new Muslim communities as Ottoman.

The Hagia Sophia, captured in 1453 and converted to a mosque, remained the most important imperial mosque of the city. The Süleymaniye was conceived by Sinan as a deliberate rival to Hagia Sophia, and the Selimiye in Edirne as a deliberate improvement on both. Sinan’s own notebooks record that he judged the Süleymaniye a worthy work but a partial success, the Şehzade a full success, and the Selimiye the perfect mosque.

Ottoman Baroque and the eighteenth century

By the early eighteenth century, the austere classicism of Sinan had begun to give way to a more ornamental phase. The Tulip Period (1718–1730), the brief era of peace and westernization under Sultan Ahmed III, brought European Baroque and Rococo motifs into Ottoman architecture — the same decorative taste that marked the miniature painting of Levni treated in Ottoman art and music — and the Nuruosmaniye Mosque (1755) in Istanbul, designed by Simeon Kalfa and completed by Mustafa Ağa, is the earliest large Ottoman mosque built in a recognizably European Baroque idiom.

The most spectacular works of the Ottoman Baroque are the imperial pavilions of the Bosphorus — the Beylerbeyi Palace (1865), the Çırağan Palace (1871), and the waterside kiosks of the Yıldız complex. These long, low, ornate palaces mixed Western Baroque and Rococo decoration with Ottoman carpentry, calligraphy, and carved-wood ornament, and they introduced to the imperial household the kinds of mirrored halls, painted ceilings, and crystal chandeliers that characterize European princely architecture of the period.

The Hamid I and Mahmud II mosques, the Ortaköy Mosque on the Bosphorus, and the Dolmabahçe Mosque are the major late examples of the style. They are heavily decorated, with carved marble, alabaster panels, and a great deal of gilt and calligraphic ornament, and they reflect the Europeanization of the imperial taste in the nineteenth century.

The Balyan family and the nineteenth century

The Balyan family of Armenian architects dominated Ottoman court architecture in the nineteenth century. The most famous member, Krikor Balyan, designed the Dolmabahçe Palace (1856), the Çırağan Palace (1871), and several imperial mosques; his son Simon Balyan completed several major works. The Balyans were responsible for the eclectic, European-influenced architecture of the late Ottoman court, and they trained a generation of Ottoman architects who carried the tradition forward into the early Republic.

The Beylerbeyi Palace, the Yıldız Palace complex, and the various imperial waterside kiosks are the principal surviving examples of Balyan work, and they are remarkable for their mixture of styles: a fundamentally European Baroque plan, a polychromatic marble and stucco exterior, and a series of interior rooms in which the European and Ottoman decorative traditions are mixed almost in equal parts.

Materials, ornament, and craft

Ottoman architecture relied on a handful of well-established materials: cut limestone or ashlar for the principal mosques and palaces; brick for the supporting structures; marble for the columns, the mihrab, the minbar, and the floor; lead for the domes and the minaret caps; and timber for the interior floors, doors, and ceilings. The great mosques of Istanbul were built in a distinctive pale stone from the quarries of the Bosphorus; the mosques of Edirne and Bursa often used local red stone; the provincial mosques used local materials to the extent they were available.

The ornament of the classical mosque was entirely non-figurative. The walls were covered in calligraphic inscriptions of the Qur’an, in particular the Ayat al-Kursi (the Throne Verse); the dadoes were lined with marble panels; the windows were filled with vitray — a kind of stained glass assembled from small pieces of colored glass set in plaster lattices; the mihrab and the minbar were carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the ceilings were painted with geometric and arabesque ornament. The absence of the human figure in religious ornament was not a sign of a lack of artistic skill, but a deliberate application of Islamic prohibition.

Outside the religious sphere, however, the Ottoman decorative tradition was rich in figural representation. The miniature paintings of the imperial albums, the painted ceilings of the imperial pavilions, the carved and gilded wooden ceilings of the harem apartments, and the silk embroideries of the imperial wardrobe all show human figures — courtiers, musicians, hunters, animals, and flowers — in great variety and great profusion.

The legacy

Ottoman architecture, in one form or another, is the principal visible inheritance of the empire. The mosques, the bridges, the hamams, the bazaars, the palaces, the medreses, the fountains, and the türbes that the Ottomans built across three continents are still standing, and many of them are still in use. The classical idiom of Sinan remained a model for mosque architecture in much of the Islamic world through the twentieth century, and the work of the Balyans shaped the architectural taste of nineteenth-century Egypt, the Balkans, and the early Turkish Republic.

The most concentrated collection of Ottoman monuments is, of course, in Istanbul, where the Süleymaniye, the Sultan Ahmed, the Fatih, the Beyazid, the Şehzade, the Yeni Valide, the Nuruosmaniye, the Ortaköy, the Dolmabahçe, and the Topkapı Palace all stand within the old walls, together with hundreds of smaller mosques, hamams, türbes, and fountains. The Topkapı complex, in particular, is one of the great palace-museums of the world, and the Süleymaniye is widely regarded as the eighth wonder of the medieval and early modern world. The article on Mimar Sinan treats the architect of the Süleymaniye in more detail.