Solomon, I have outdone thee!

Solomon, I have outdone thee!

‘’ …Sinan’s first encounter with Hagia Sophia is hard to date precisely, for there is only sparse information about his life apart from the self-dictated biography, a story oscillating between modesty and megalomania. He presumably saw Hagia Sophia for the first time in 1511 upon his arrival in Istanbul as a twenty-year-old man who was to attend the janissary school where he was trained as a carpenter and converted from Christianity to Islam. At that time, becoming the chief architect of the court had probably never crossed his mind, let alone the idea that he would be commissioned sixty years later to “correct” this building. Before Suleiman the Magnificent named him his chief architect, Sinan spent twenty-five years in the army as a civil engineer carrying out infrastructural and maintenance work during the sieges. He was pretty lucky: he survived three sultans through the peak period of the empire. But this might also have caused his admiration for Hagia Sophia to turn into the lifelong ambition of surpassing it inasmuch as the sultans obliged him to build something bigger and better. He got several chances to surpass Hagia Sophia, and many of his mosques carry traces of his thorough study of this building…’’