The most prestigious complex remains the one built by Soliman the Magnificent, between 1550 and 1557. Vying with Haghia Sophia, the mosque dominates the city skyline to the extent that it is visible from north of the Golden Horn. It is also surrounded by a series of buildings used for educational and social functions. Behind the mosque, decorated with magnificent ceramic panels, lie the mausoleums of the sultan and his wife Hurrem Sultana.
The grand viziers of Soliman's reign also vied with each other in public works. The Rustem Pasha Mosque, built in 1560 near the port, is a veritable ceramic museum. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha built two mosques in the city and a third body of buildings comprising a medersa and his own mausoleum, in the Eyup suburbs at the tip of the Golden Horn, a site reserved for the burial of dignitaries of the empire. This whole collection of monuments, as well as hundreds of others, were built by the architect Sinan, a major figure in Ottoman architecture.
The mosque built by Ahmed I (1603-1617) next to the former Byzantine racecourse and opposite Haghia Sophia is the last prestigious building of that period. The only mosque to boast six minarets, it is known as the Blue Mosque because of the colour of its interior decoration.
The financial crisis that affected the Empire in the 17th century led to a relative decrease in prestige building ventures, but they obtained a new lease on life in the following century thanks to a new style known as Ottoman Baroque. The first buildings in this style were the monumental fountains, the best example of which is still the Ahmed III Fountain, built in 1729, facing the entrance to the Topkapi Palace. In the Nuruosmaniye Mosque, completed in 1755 (and the courtyard which visitors are obliged to cross in order to enter the Great Bazaar), western influences have been reinterpreted in a thoroughly original manner.
Not only Baroque, but Rococo, Neo-classicism and Empire styles also influenced Ottoman architects, who adapted these new ideas to their building programmes, erecting mosques, mausoleums and a palace, all of which constantly renewed Istanbul's architecture until the end of the Empire. Meanwhile, the city extended northwards, to the banks of the Bosphorus where the dignitaries of the Empire built magnificent residences at the water's edge, the yali, but also north of the Golden Horn where the European districts developed around the ambassadors' residences.
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