Lonely Planet İstanbul Guide

Ottoman Architecture After the Conquest, the sultans wasted no time in putting their architectural stamp on the city. Mehmet didn’t even wait until he had the city under his control, building the monumental Rumeli Hisarı on the Bosphorus in 1452, the year before his great victory. Once in the city, Mehmet kicked off a centuries-long Ottoman building spree, constructing a number of buildings, including a mosque on the fourth hill. After these he started work on the most famous Ottoman building of all: Topkapı Palace. Mehmet had a penchant for palaces, but his great-grandson, Süleyman the Magnificent, was more of a mosque man. With his favourite architect, Mimar Sinan, he built the greatest of the city’s Ottoman imperial mosques. Sinan’s prototype mosque form has a forecourt with a şadırvan (ablutions fountain) and domed arcades on three sides. On the fourth side is the mosque, with a two-storey porch. The main prayer hall is covered by a central dome surrounded by smaller domes and semidomes. There was usually one minaret, though imperial mosques had more. Each imperial mosque had a külliye (mosque complex) clustered around it. This was a philanthropic complex including a medrese (seminary), hamam, darüşşifa (hospital), imaret (soup kitchen), kütüphane (library), tabhane (inn for travelling dervishes) or kervansaray (caravanserai) and cemetery with türbes (tombs). Over time many of these külliyes were demolished; fortunately, a number of the buildings in the magnificent Süleymaniye and Atik Valide complexes remain intact. Later sultans continued Mehmet’s palace-building craze. No palace would rival Topkapı, but Sultan Abdül Mecit I tried his best with the grandiose Dolmabahçe Palace and Abdül Aziz I built the extravagant Çırağan Palace and Beylerbeyi Palace. These and other buildings of the era have been collectively dubbed ‘Turkish baroque’. These mosques and palaces dominate the landscape and skyline of the city, but there are other quintessentially Ottoman buildings: the hamam and