Ihsan MUNGAN - HaliçUniversityDepartment of Architecture İstanbul, Turkey

The Turkish titles of the famous Ottoman ‘Master-Builder’ Sinan are ‘Mimar’ which means ‘Architect’ in Turkish and ‘Koca’ having the meaning ‘The Great’. In fact, both titles are insufficient to express precisely the talent and works of this unparalleled genius of architecture and structural engineering who have lived along the whole 16. Century. Attributed to Sinan are at least 312 structural works distributed in a geography from Budapest in Hungary over Sarajevo in Bosnia into the whole Balkan Peninsula, through whole Anatolia to El-Kudus, Medina and Mecca in the South; and to Diyarbakir, Van and Bagdad in the East. Among Sinan’s Works domed mosques deserve special attention, not because of their large number which makes nearly one third of the whole, but mainly through their architectural and structural versatility. The inspirations Sinan received from Eastern, namely mainly Persian, and from Western, namely Roman and Byzantine dome traditions enabled him to create marvelous mosques which adorn many cities of the Ottoman Empire of the 16th Century. Being the capital of the Empire, especially in Istanbul one can see almost all structural types of Sinan’s mosques expressing his unique style creating the Ottoman Classical Architecture.

Keywords-Sinan; domes; mosques; Eastern dome tradition;Western dome tradition