Ottoman
The Selimiye Mosque at Edirne
Sinan's masterpiece rising over its courtyard, 1568-1574
976-982 AH / 1568-1574 CE
Educational historical reconstructionWhere
Selimiye Mosque, Edirne
41.6782, 26.5592 · View on OpenStreetMap
Background
The Selimiye Mosque at Edirne was built between 1568 and 1574 (976-982 AH) for Sultan Selim II (rahimahu Allah) and is the work the architect Sinan (rahimahu Allah) himself named as his masterpiece, completed when he was already about eighty years old. In his memoirs, dictated to the poet Sai Mustafa Celebi and preserved as the Tezkiretu'l-Bunyan and Tezkiretu'l-Ebniye, Sinan ranks the Selimiye as the work of his mastership, above the Suleymaniye of his journeyman years and the Sehzade of his apprenticeship. Edirne, in Thrace, had been the Ottoman capital before the conquest of Constantinople and remained a favoured royal city; Sinan set the mosque on a rise so that its dome dominates the whole town. The building solves a problem the Ottoman architects had pursued for a century: how to roof a single undivided hall with one great dome. Instead of bracing the dome with semidomes, as at the Suleymaniye and as the Byzantines had done at Hagia Sophia, Sinan carried it on an octagon of eight massive piers linked by arches, freeing the interior into one luminous space. The dome is about 31.28 metres across, slightly wider than the dome of Hagia Sophia, fulfilling the long-stated Ottoman ambition to surpass the old cathedral. Four minarets, each about seventy-one metres tall and unusually thin, rise at the four corners of the prayer hall, each with three balconies, and two of them famously contain three separate spiral staircases. Before the prayer hall lies a marble-paved courtyard wrapped by a portico of domed bays on columns, with a sixteen-sided fountain of carved and pierced marble under a free-standing canopy at its centre, the largest such ablution fountain Sinan built. The mosque anchors a charitable complex, an endowment whose Qur'an school, college and covered market street were tied by deed to its upkeep. The Selimiye is widely regarded as the high point of Ottoman classical architecture and is today a UNESCO World Heritage site. This scene shows the building in its final years of work, seen from the great courtyard while stonemasons still dress and carve blocks across the marble paving and the upper galleries are being finished, before the mosque was given over to prayer.
What you see
The view stands inside the marble-paved forecourt of a single colossal mosque whose dome and minarets rise behind the arcade. This is a town on a river plain in Thrace, the Ottoman capital before the move to the city on the Bosphorus, inland from the Aegean near the meeting of rivers.
One enormous dome on a wide drum tops the prayer hall behind the courtyard, with no cascade of flanking semidomes stepping down beside it. That single great dome over an undivided hall, rather than a pyramid of half-domes, is the structural signature here.
Exceptionally tall and slender fluted minarets, each ringed by three balconies, climb at the corners of the prayer hall and tower over the courtyard arcade. They are among the tallest minarets raised anywhere in the Muslim world to this date.
The courtyard is wrapped on its sides by a colonnaded portico of small domed bays on slim columns, each bay roofed by its own little cupola, with broad pointed arches between the piers. The portico domes step up in size as they near the mosque itself.
A free-standing domed canopy of carved and pierced marble shelters the ablution fountain in the middle of the court, a many-sided basin where worshippers wash before prayer. It is the largest such courtyard fountain the master built.
Across the marble paving stonemasons kneel over half-dressed blocks, chisels and mallets at hand, squaring ashlar and carving spolia while the upper works are still being finished. The forecourt is a working yard, the great mosque not yet handed over for prayer.
The whole precinct reads as one endowed foundation: the mosque, its arcaded court and fountain, and the ranges beyond that housed a Qur'an school, a college and a covered market street whose rents would sustain the charity in perpetuity.
Further reading & cross-references
Sai Mustafa Celebi, Tezkiretu'l-Bunyan and Tezkiretu'l-Ebniye (16th c.): Sinan's career as dictated to the poet Sai, the source for Sinan's own ranking of the Selimiye as his masterpiece (ustadlik) above the Suleymaniye and the Sehzade. Self-presenting but the key statement of authorial intent.
Foundation inscriptions and waqfiyya of the Selimiye (extant): Name the patron Selim II, the architect, and the date of completion (AH 976 begun, AH 982 finished, per the west-portal inscription), and define the endowed institutions of the complex. The documentary anchor for the dating.
Gulru Necipoglu, The Age of Sinan (2005): Standard modern study. Used for the octagonal baldachin engineering, the comparison of the dome diameter with Hagia Sophia, the minaret design, the marble courtyard and fountain, and the dating of the campaign 1568-1574.
Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture (1971): Classic English-language survey. Used for the courtyard portico of domed bays, the carved marble ablution fountain, the interior arrangement, and the place of the Selimiye at the head of the classical canon.
Iznik tile production studies (Atasoy and Raby, Iznik, 1989): Used to date and describe the underglaze tile revetments of the royal loge and mihrab in the prayer hall to the peak tomato-red phase of the kilns, matching the mosque's completion years. (The tilework is interior and not seen in this courtyard view.)
Standing fabric of the Selimiye (extant, UNESCO World Heritage): The surviving mosque, courtyard portico, marble fountain, market street and college constrain the reconstruction. Reviewers should keep the dome on its octagon of eight piers, the four minarets very tall and thin, and the courtyard fountain sixteen-sided under its own canopy.
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