Mimar Sinan: The Dome That Summoned Its Architect to Trial

Old and believed to have reached the end of his path, Mimar Sinan is woken one night in Edirne by a summons to the Court of Domes, charged with spending his life searching for a dome that stone refuses to believe he can build. Beneath a judge that is a great dome of pure emptiness, his earlier works testify: the Şehzade Mosque, which he called the work of his apprenticeship, and the Süleymaniye, the work of his maturity, after which he kept looking toward a distant place. The massive pillars say he asked them to be strong and then to disappear, Stone says he forced it to discover the strength sleeping within it, and Light, the final witness, says that whenever stone increased he gave it a window. On the plan of Edirne rises the Selimiye Mosque with its great dome, and Sinan explains that a great work does not always need a capital, since it may choose a distant city and make the world come to it. Found guilty of continuing to learn after people called him master, he is sentenced to die while his question stays alive, and the book ends with the thought that an architect may need a whole lifetime to place the sky upon pillars without making people feel its weight.