Selimiye The Magnificent

Architecture was the pre-eminent Ottoman art, and it reached its apex with the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne in western Turkey. In the 1970s, when I was studying architecture in Istanbul and much preoccupied by the principles underlying the great Ottoman monuments, especially those designed by Sinan, the greatest of all Ottoman architects, who built the Selimiye, I made a special trip to Edirne just to see it. The mosque was just as I remembered it when I'd first visited with my father 10 years earlier, its great single-domed silhouette rising high above the vast plain, dominating the landscape from many kilometers away.

No other Ottoman monument has imprinted its image on a city in quite this way. Though Edirne is packed with picturesque historic buildings, they seem all the smaller next to this mosque and its great dome. Sinan built it for Selim II between 1569 and 1575, when Ottoman military and cultural power was at its height. In the 16th century, as Ottoman sultans ventured ever deeper into Europe, this now forgotten capital city became central to — and emblematic of — the imperial project.

The more the empire grew, the more it needed to find its center. The Selimiye expresses this centralizing impulse in its very design, as did all of Sinan's work and, indeed, all great Ottoman religious architecture. The dream was to compose a mosque that — viewed either from the inside or the outside — was a single mass, dominated by a single dome. The great Ottoman mosques of earlier periods — like Sinan's own earlier works — displayed a multitude of little domes and half-domes, and the beauty was in the harmonious interplay between the great dome rising somewhat indistinctly from the center and the half-domes, weight towers and buttresses crowded around it.

With the Selimiye Mosque, which Sinan called his "masterwork," the overriding ambition was to replace this busy confusion with one enormous dome. When I was studying architecture, my classmates and I saw a link between the desire for a central dome and the mercilessly centralizing political and economic machinery of empire. But in a book written in his name by his friend, the poet Sai, Sinan claimed to have taken his inspiration from Istanbul's Hagia Sophia.

Planted around the Selimiye's great dome are four minarets — the tallest of the classical Islamic age. They, too, reflect the twinned intellectual concerns that shaped the mosque's composition — the quest for a center, and the desire for symmetry. Inside two of these minarets are three separate and never-intersecting staircases leading to three separate balconies, a feat of consonance that echoes the building's timeless geometry.

But after being dazzled by the symmetrical extravagance of the exterior, the plain, pure symmetries of its interior comes as a shock. This shock reveals the secret key to all Ottoman architectural thinking: that monumental exteriors proclaiming the wealth and power of the Ottoman Empire, and the abiding greatness of its sultans, should be allied with pure inner spaces that draw the faithful into direct communion with God.

As with all great Ottoman mosques, the Selimiye's interior derives its power not from paintings, ornaments and embellishments, but from its clean, spare lines. To enter it is to forget the power, determination, wealth and technical mastery of the Ottoman Empire and its sultans, and to succumb instead to the mysterious light seeping in through its multitude of tiny windows; it is to look at the composition of light and dark and read of man's insignificance.

But this is not an architectural idiom that overwhelms the visitor with its soul-crushing perpendiculars. It is a circular architecture that affirms humanity and evokes the simplicity of life and death. As we stand inside Sinan's masterwork, it is his visible and invisible symmetries that call out to us; it is the mosque's sublime geometry that evokes God's perfection in the plain and powerful purity of the dome, the bare stone, the eight slender pillars.

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Orhan Pamuk has written seven novels and Istanbul, a personal memoir of the city