Süleymaniye Mosque rose in just seven years, yet Sinan engineered it to ride out the earthquakes that have rattled Istanbul ever since. He raised it for Suleiman the Magnificent, finishing in 1557, crowning the city's Third Hill with a dome that climbs more than fifty metres. It was never meant to stand alone: around it Sinan laid a self-contained city of colleges, a hospital, a caravanserai, a hammam and a public kitchen that fed the poor daily. Tradition says he called this merely his journeyman work — the masterpiece came later, in Edirne.
Inside, the mosque is one huge, calm room, and light pours into it through rows of windows. The Iznik tiles are used with a restraint that later mosques abandoned. Look up for the ostrich eggs strung among the lamps, and for the small chamber above the main door: air currents drew the lamps' smoke into it, and the soot that gathered there was scraped off and made into ink for the complex's calligraphers. Outside, the garden holds the domed tombs of Suleiman and his wife Hurrem. It is still a working mosque, and its back terrace offers one of the old city's finest free views over the Golden Horn.