Architecture · a Light

He became chief architect at fifty and worked fifty more years

Sinan was born around 1490 to a Christian family in Anatolia, taken into Ottoman service through the levy of boys, and spent his early career as a military engineer building bridges on campaign. He was made chief court architect in 1538, at about fifty. The registers of his office credit him with roughly three hundred buildings, many of them the work of assistants under his name. He called the Selimiye in Edirne, finished in 1575, his masterwork, and set out to make its dome match the span of Hagia Sophia, which by careful measurement it very nearly does. He also rebuilt the water supply of Istanbul. He is buried in a small stone tomb he built himself, beside one of his own water channels.

Mimar Sinan · c. 1490 to 1588