Photos

The Selimiye Mosque is located in Edirne, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire, near the border of modern Turkey with Bulgaria.

The mosque was commissioned by Sultan Selim II and was built by architect Mimar Sinan between 1569 and 1575. It was considered by Sinan to be his masterpiece and is one of the highest achievements of Islamic architecture.

Selimiye stands at the center of a külliye, an Islamic tradition to crown a major mosque with complementary buildings serving the society, such as a hospital, school, library and baths. The complex is structured under a vakıf, or a foundation, whose sole purpose is to maintain the buildings and the public services go interrupted for centuries thru the income generated by the rent of shops located in its arasta.

Mimar Sinan is the most famous architect of the Ottoman Empire, having served under three different sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent being one of them. Born in central Anatolia, in Kayseri, as the son of an Armenian stonemason, Mimar Sinan joined the Ottoman military the Janissaries at the age of 22, converted to Islam, and excelled as a military engineer. He rose to the position of chief architect in his fourties and was able to erect, with the help of his team, more than 300 structures, from bridges to mosques and schools.

At the start of his career as an architect, Sinan had to deal with an established, traditional domed architecture. His training as an army engineer allowed him to analyse buildings in a vast geography from Europe to the Middle East, and led him to approach architecture from an empirical point of view, rather than from a theoretical one. He started to experiment with the design and engineering of single-domed and multiple-domed structures. He tried to obtain a new geometrical purity, a rationality and a spatial integrity in his structures and designs of mosques. Through all this, he demonstrated his creativity and his wish to create a clear, unified space. He started to develop a series of variations on the domes, surrounding them in different ways with semi-domes, piers, screen walls and different sets of galleries. His domes and arches are curved, but he avoided curvilinear elements in the rest of his design, transforming the circle of the dome into a rectangular, hexagonal or octagonal system. He tried to obtain a rational harmony between the exterior pyramidal composition of semi-domes, culminating in a single drumless dome, and the interior space where this central dome vertically integrates the space into a unified whole. His genius lies in the organization of this space and in the resolution of the tensions created by the design. He was an innovator in the use of decoration and motifs, merging them into the architectural forms as a whole. He accentuated the centre underneath the central dome by flooding it with light from the many windows. He incorporated his mosques in an efficient way into a complex, serving the needs of the community as an intellectual centre, a community centre and serving the social needs and the health problems of the faithful.

In Selimiye, Sinan employed an octagonal supporting system that is created through eight pillars incised in a square shell of walls. The four semi domes at the corners of the square behind the arches that spring from the pillars, are intermediary sections between the huge encompassing dome (with a diameter of 31.25m, and a height of 43m) and the walls.

Taken from the balcony of the mosque. Increased brightness and sharpness, corrected the axis.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selimiye_Mosque_(Edirne)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimar_Sinan