SULEYMANIYE AND 16TH-CENTURY ISTANBUL As the great master of major monuments of the 16th-century Ottoman Empire, responsi- ble for public works for 50 years, designer, engineer of bridges and of a vast system of water supply for Istanbul, architect without rival in Turkish history, Sinan had a con- scious approach to city planning. Can we find any indications of thoughts of larger space organization than his architectural composi tions offer? It is difficult to discern systematic approach to city design in Sinan’s time, if we understand the term in its current sense. But should we assume that the city of Istanbul developed for about five centuries without an inherent mechanism which helped her to survive? What kind of mechanism guid- ed, consciously or unconsciously, the growth of a city pattern? If such a mechanism ever existed, do Sinan’s buildings reveal its nature? As far as written documents are concerned we cannot say that there are any specific allusions to the shaping of the city, or part of it, above architectural scale. Sinan is, singularly silent about his art. The so-called “Monographs” do not expose his ideas and his genius, but simply enumerate his buildings and relate his life story.’ Unless we find other documents we can only say that he was interested in doing, rather than. thinking about his doing. On the other hand it is evident that his buildings reveal certain urban concepts by their placement, by their functional distribu- tion in the city, by their relative massing and their specific role in the cityscape, and by their function in patterning of the city structure. The planned city does not belong to any one culture. And on whatever historical perspec- tive we would place 16th-century Ottoman culture, be it Central Asian, Islamic, Mediter- ranean, Middle Eastern, ali these backgrounds have in their tradition the idea of regular city pattern. Yet, the immediate predecessors of the Ottoman city, the medieval Islamic and Byzantine cities, seem to have forgotten or superseded ‘these phases. Neither in the time of Sinan, which is the most glorious period of Ottoman history, nor afterwards, do we see planning efforts in Istanbul comparable to those of the early Baghdad of Abbasids or to the cities of Renaissance Europe. We have to forget the planned city. Before analyzing Sinan’s time we have to recall fifteenth-century Istanbul. The last decades of the Byzantine capital and the ear- ly development of the city after 1453 have been well recorded in documents and per- sonal memoires. The Spanish ambassador to Timur's court in Central Asia, Clavijo, who saw Constantinopolis in 1403, says that the space within the walls consisted of a number of hamlets separated by orchards and fields. Palaces and churches were in ruins. Only the quarters on the coast had a certain density of population The capital of the Eastern Roman Empire was reduced to a ruined city of less than 50,000 souls before the Turkish conquest. Immediately after the conquest, old monasteries and habitable buildings’ were given to the newcomers. A mixed population from various parts of the Empire were settl- ed in Istanbul. Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque. The city walls were repaired. ‘Anew castle was built against the western Imperial gate. A palace was built near or on the Forum Tauri. And a second palace was started on the promontory dominating the en- trance of the Golden Horn over the site of the first Greek city. During the reign of Mehmet Il the number of public constructions reach- ‘ed 300; the capital's population at the end of his reign was about 120,000. The most impor- tant and symbolic urban act was the founda- tion of Mehmet’s mosque and tomb over the destroyed church of the Holy Apostles where originally the martyrium of Constantine was. ‘The great Turkish-Muslim feature of the new capital was the implantation of the con- querors’ signature on the image of the city. The major element in the Istanbul landscape, bringing a different sense of urban organiza- tion, was the series of the great imperial mos- que'complexes which shaped the form of the Turkish Istanbul. At the end of the 15th-century the German traveller Amold von Harff found Istanbul a grand city of 200,000 people.* A large part of this population was settled around the coast line over looking the Golden Horn and sur- rounding the new monumental axis of the ci- ty. Beyazit I! built his mosque near his palace on the old Forum Tauri. Thus before the age of Sinan and Sultan Suleyman the Magnifi- cent the functional division of the city was already laid out and the base lines for its visual development partly shaped around the great socio-religious complexes. The image of the city before Sinan's great works is best conveyed by the famous miniature plan by the painter Nasuh (called al-Matraki), dated 1532. It is a clear statement of an urban concept of his time. Here the ci- ty is not conceived as a mesh of streets and squares. It is directionless. Only prominent‘THE FIRST SYSTEMATIC PLAN OF ISTANBUL 8Y KAUFFER (1776) pot ee ET embuildings and complexes are represented within partly comprehensible spatial rela- tionships. The basic unifying element of Istanbul is a socio-religious complex the kalliye. It is the focus of social life and backbone of the city pattern. It may be taken as a basic ex Planatory tool for the analysis of the Turkish Capital. The monument presented here is the Suleymaniye. The famous traveller of the 17th century Evliya Celebi describes it as follows: “Saleyman Han built the Mosque of Soleymaniye and its dependencies with the war booty of Beograd, the Islands of Malta and Rhodes. “He built over a hilltop looking to the sea a pearless mosque. From all over the empire thousands of architects, builders, stonecut- ters, workers were collected. “The mosque is surrounded by an outer cour- tyard as large as two race corses. Tall plane trees, cypresses, and linden trees decorate the courtyard surrounded by walls pierced with windows. All the people who come to prayer can see the palaces: Uskidar on the Anatolian side, the castles and many sites on the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. It is a courtyard to watch the world. “On the left and right of the mosque there are four great madrasas for four different rites which are full of scholars, and students. Then there is a school of hadis, a school of kuran, a school of medicine, a school for young children, a hospital, ‘a public kitchen, a hospice, a caravanserail for the visitors, a palace for the commander of the janissaries, markets for jewelers, metal workers, and shoemakers, a well illuminated bath and buildings for the employees of the complex. Around the mosque a thousand(!) domes can. be counted. When seen from Galata the whole is like a complex of gigantic blue shapes. Three thousand employees serve this complex. And all the incomes of the Mediterranean islands, including Rhodes and Chios, are endowed for the upkeep of it. All knowledgeable people, engineers and ar- chitects of the world agree that there is no stronger building in the world”. ‘Though not especially talented when Gelebi speaks about architecture, one can catch from his description the prominent role this, [- ISTANBUL FROM THE ENTRANCE TO THE GOLDEN HORN (FROM ALLOM)