Selimiye Mosque

An old man stands on a building site in Edirne with a grudge. He is close to eighty. Behind him are fifty years of work and hundreds of buildings; the skyline of Istanbul is largely his. But one thing has been bothering him for most of that career: the dome of Hagia Sophia. For a thousand years nobody has matched it, and he has heard people say that the empire's architects could never build what the Christians built. The man is Mimar Sinan, chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, and the Selimiye Mosque is his reply.

We know how he felt because his friend Sai Mustafa Çelebi wrote it down. In that memoir Sinan describes the Şehzade Mosque as the work of his apprenticeship, the Süleymaniye as the work of his journeyman years, and the Selimiye as the work of his mastery. It is telling that he reached his peak not in Istanbul, where he had served the palace for half a century, but in Edirne, the empire's old capital, where there was a bigger plot, less interference, and a hilltop on which a building could stand alone.

Why Edirne

The mosque was commissioned by Sultan Selim II. Construction began in 1568, was essentially complete by 1574, and the mosque opened in 1575. Selim had a personal fondness for Edirne, but the city also carried weight: it had been the Ottoman capital before the conquest of Constantinople, and sultans still set out from here on campaigns into Europe. Sinan chose the highest flat ground in town. Approach Edirne from any direction today and the first thing you see is four minarets.

The problem Sinan set himself was simple to state and very hard to solve: how do you carry an enormous dome without breaking up the space underneath it? At the Süleymaniye he had borrowed the half-dome arrangement of Hagia Sophia. At the Selimiye he abandoned it. He set the dome on eight massive piers and pushed those piers out toward the walls, leaving the centre completely open. Walk in and you take in the entire hall at a glance; no column interrupts the view. The dome is a little over 31 metres across, almost exactly the width of Hagia Sophia's. Whether Sinan meant to beat it or merely to equal it has been argued for centuries. What is certain is that his dome stands on thinner walls, with less buttressing, and was built in a fraction of the time.

The four minarets, each around 71 metres tall, were the highest of their day. The real trick is inside them. Two of the minarets contain three separate spiral staircases, each leading to a different balcony, and the three never meet. Three muezzins could climb at once without seeing one another.

Shells And Soldiers

Selim II never saw the building finished; he died in the last days of 1574. The mosque carries his name, but its fortunes followed the city's. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 Edirne was occupied by the Russian army. In 1913, during the Balkan Wars, a Bulgarian siege lasted months and artillery shells fell on the city, some striking the mosque's dome and courtyard. A shell mark is still pointed out to visitors today. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Edirne became a border town, and the Selimiye was left standing in the middle of a place that was no longer a capital of anything.

The surroundings changed too. The covered bazaar beneath the mosque, the Arasta, was added after Sinan's death, under Murad III and the architect Davud Ağa, with its rents assigned to the upkeep of the mosque. People have been shopping in those stalls for roughly four hundred and fifty years.

The Upside-Down Tulip

The detail worth sharing sits on one of the marble supports of the muezzins' platform. Among all the carved decoration there is a single tulip, and it is upside down. The story told in Edirne goes that a tulip garden stood on the site, that its owner refused to sell, and that when he finally gave in he insisted his tulip be remembered. Sinan kept the promise and inverted the flower, so the story says, as a small comment on stubbornness. Nobody can prove it. But the tulip is there, and every guide points to it.

There is also the light. Sinan cut hundreds of windows into the walls and drum, so the sun enters from different directions and the hall changes hour by hour. Sit inside for an hour and you leave feeling you have seen several mosques.

Today

The Selimiye Mosque and its complex were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2011. It is maintained by Turkey's Directorate General of Foundations and remains a working mosque, open for prayer five times a day. A major restoration began in 2021, covering everything from the lead sheeting of the dome to the minaret balconies, and the building spent years behind scaffolding.

The threats are no longer armies. Thrace is earthquake country, the stone is four and a half centuries old, and damp works at it from within. There is also a quieter problem: the hilltop Sinan chose so the building could stand alone is slowly filling in around it. The effort now is not to let the Selimiye dominate the city, but to make sure the city can still see it.