Suleymaniye Mosque

The four minarets surrounding the Suleymaniye Mosque carry ten balconies, a detail Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent insisted upon to mark his status as the tenth Ottoman sultan since the founding of the empire. Mimar Sinan, the chief architect, finished the massive stone complex in fifteen fifty-seven. When an earthquake cracked the dome centuries later, Sinan’s design held the structure steady, using a sophisticated system of weight distribution that remains one of the greatest feats of sixteenth-century engineering in the Islamic world.