Religious Buildings, History, Architecture 

Mimar Koca Sinan (1489-1588), the 'Great Architect Sinan', was appointed chief royal architect to the Ottoman court by Sultan Suleyman I in 1538. During his 50-year career Sinan designed and constructed hundreds of buildings including mosques, palaces, harems, chapels, tombs, schools, almshouses, madrassahs, caravan serais, granaries, fountains, aqueducts and hospitals. His distinctive architectural idiom left its imprint over the terrains of a vast empire extending from the Danube to the Tigris, and he became the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects.Sinan's most influential buildings were his mosques, where his inventive experimention with light-filled centralized domes, often compared with parallel developments in Renaissance Italy, produced spaces in which the central dome appeared weightless and the interior surfaces bathed in light. - from Amzon