page_title: Mimar Sinan
section_title: Death and Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Mimar Sinan / Death and Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Türkçe: E7 serisi 10.000 TL'nin arka yüzü
context_page_description: Mimar Sinan c. 1488/1490 – July 17, 1588 was the chief Ottoman architect and civil engineer for sultans Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II, and Murad III. Known as Koca Mi'mâr Sinân Âğâ, "Sinan Agha the Grand Architect", he was responsible for the construction of more than 300 major structures and other more modest projects, such as schools. His apprentices would later design the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul and Stari Most in Mostar.
  The son of a stonemason, he received a technical education and became a military engineer. He rose rapidly through the ranks to become first an officer and finally a Janissary commander, with the honorific title of ağa. He refined his architectural and engineering skills while on campaign with the Janissaries, becoming expert at constructing fortifications of all kinds, as well as military infrastructure projects, such as roads, bridges and aqueducts. At about the age of fifty, he was appointed as chief royal architect, applying the technical skills he had acquired in the army to the "creation of fine religious buildings" and civic structures of all kinds. He remained in this post for almost fifty years.
context_section_description: Sinan died in AH 996 (1587-88 CE) and is buried in a tomb in Istanbul, a türbe of his own design, just to the north of the Süleymaniye Mosque, across a street named Mimar Sinan Caddesi in his honour. He was buried near the tombs of his greatest patrons: Sultan Süleyman I and Sultana Haseki Hürrem, Suleiman's wife. Above the iron-grilled prayer window of his tomb is an epitaph written in Ottoman Turkish by the poet Mustafa Sai. It gives the year of his death and records that Sinan built 400 masjids (small mosques), 80 Friday mosques and the Kanuni Sultan Suleiman bridge at Büyükçekmece.
  In 1935, his remains were exhumed by a group of Turkish scholars. Proponents of the racial science popular at the time, they claimed that measurements of Sinan's skull proved that he was actually Turkish.
  His name is also given to:
  a crater on the planet Mercury.
  A Turkish state university, the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul.
  Sinan's portrait was depicted on the reverse of the Turkish 10,000 lira banknotes of 1982-1995
  and a 7 500 000 lira coin of 2001 (in the "millennium" series), also on 6 postage stamps: 100 lira 1957 (400th anniversary of the opening of the Suleymaniye Mosque), 50 lira 1988 (400th anniversary of Sinan's death) and a set of 4 issued on 14 November 2007 (60, 70, 70 & 80 Kurus - Sinan and his works).
  Elif Shafak's novel The Architect's Apprentice revolves around Mimar Sinan: "Filled with the scents, sounds and sights of the Ottoman Empire, when Istanbul was the teeming centre of civilisation, The Architect's Apprentice is a magical, sweeping tale of one boy and his elephant caught up in a world of wonder and danger."
caption: Sinan and the Selimiye Mosque on the reverse of the Turkish 10,000 lira banknote of 1982-1995
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