Crowning one of the seven hills of Istanbul, the Suleymaniye Mosque is the serene summit of Ottoman architecture. Commissioned by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and designed by the empire's greatest architect, Mimar Sinan, it was completed in the 1550s. Many consider it Sinan's finest work in the imperial capital, a building of perfect calm and balance.
Sinan and the Ottoman style
The Ottoman architects learned from the vast domed interior of the nearby Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, but they did not copy it. Sinan took the geometric figures and even some proportions of Byzantine building and transformed them into something new, mastering the technique of the great central dome carried on half-domes and piers. The result is the classic Ottoman mosque: a single, unified space gathered beneath one soaring dome, rather than the divided aisles of earlier traditions. You can place this within the wider family of Mosque architecture styles around the world.
A revolution in daylight
Sinan's genius shows above all in his handling of light. Byzantine interiors tended toward a mystical gloom, a sense of a cave hollowed from the mass of the building, with light falling from high above. Sinan chose the opposite: an evenly, brightly lit space. He pierced the walls and the base of the dome with many windows so that daylight enters from every side and the whole prayer hall glows with a soft, uniform brightness. This made his mosques feel transparent and weightless, and it expressed a distinctly Islamic ideal of sacred space, open and luminous rather than shadowed. It is one of the most studied achievements in all of mosque architecture.
More than a mosque
The Suleymaniye was never a lone monument. Sinan conceived it as the centre of a great kulliye, a complex of public buildings that included religious schools, a hospital, a soup kitchen for the poor, baths, shops and the tombs of Suleyman and his wife Hurrem. This reflects the historic role of the great mosque as the hub of civic life, a theme explored in short history of mosques. To this day the complex remains woven into the fabric of the city.
Suleymaniye and its neighbours
Sinan's work set the pattern that later Ottoman architects would follow, including the builders of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque), Istanbul a short walk away, whose cascade of domes openly echoes the Suleymaniye. Seen together, the two mosques show the imperial style at its height. Both belong to the broader story told in our pillar on Great mosques of the world, and both are best appreciated alongside the Great Mosque of Cordoba (Mezquita) for how differently two Muslim empires imagined sacred space. Any unfamiliar terms are explained in the Glossary.
Visiting
The Suleymaniye is a living mosque and one of the great sights of Istanbul, with sweeping views over the Golden Horn. Visitors of all backgrounds are welcome outside prayer times, with modest dress and shoes removed at the door. Turkey has one of the richest concentrations of historic mosques anywhere: browse them in our directory of Turkey, see everything on the the interactive map, or start from the full list of find mosques.