Mimar Sinan Historical and Imagined

This book is not a monograph on Mimar Sinan. It does not offer a new summary of what is known about his life and works. It does not contain a list of his buildings. Nor does it explain why he was such an important genius and his contributions to world architecture. It does not praise Sinan and his works. It also does not include a section with an album of newly taken, highly successful photographs of Sinan's structures. Many such books already exist.

Mimar Sinan: Historical and Imaginary is a work based on two interconnected research paths: First, it discusses approaches to writing the history of Sinan and the architecture of the Sinan era and proposes alternatives, then it attempts to understand how the image of Sinan, created and still being produced in popular culture, was constructed. In the first section, it tries to show how some new possibilities can be used to write different and realistic histories of Sinan, diverging from what has been written until now. Most importantly, it endeavors to present a cool-headed historical text about Sinan, rather than a sanctifying one. The second section of the book is about the popular perception of Sinan in contemporary Turkey: why is there a popular vein that avoids seeing Sinan in the context of the ordinary social, political, economic, and cultural realities of the 16th century?

We cannot write history without willfully forgetting the possibilities and phenomena, ideas, techniques, attitudes, organizational structures, political patterns, and concerns whose existence we are overly familiar with today but which did not exist in the past. It is deplorable that there is almost no other mistake we make as frequently in historiography, especially in architectural history. Here, an effort is made not to make the same mistake, that's all.