On the third hill of Istanbul above the Golden Horn, a sultan’s mosque in its walled court, with the founder’s tomb behind and its dependencies round it (four colleges, schools of medicine and tradition, a hospital, a kitchen, a guest-house, a caravanserai, a bath and shops), all one charitable foundation. Round it, neighbourhoods of timber houses, each with its small mosque.
The Ottoman city grew by foundations. A sultan or a grandee endowed a mosque together with the institutions that served it and the neighbourhood (colleges, a hospital, a soup kitchen, a guest-house, a bath, schools, shops and a caravanserai whose rents paid for the rest) as a single charitable trust (waqf). The group, a külliye, became the nucleus of a quarter. Sinan, chief of the imperial architects from 1539 to 1588, lists hundreds of such works in his memoirs, and the Süleymaniye, which he called the work of his journeyman years, is the greatest of them.
Sinan set the mosque on the crest of the hill so that its cascade of domes and its four minarets rule the skyline above the Golden Horn, and levelled the sloping site on terraces and vaulted substructures. The mosque stands in a walled outer court planted with trees; the cemetery with the tombs of Süleyman and of Hürrem lies behind its qibla wall; the colleges line the streets on either side, and the kitchen, guest-house, hospital and caravanserai close the side towards the water. The whole complex is turned, with the mosque, towards Mecca, about 150° from Istanbul.
Round the külliye lay the mahalles, residential quarters of irregular lanes and cul-de-sacs, each gathered round its own small mosque. Their houses were built of timber on masonry ground floors, the upper storeys jettied out over the street in bays (çıkma) on brackets. Almost all of them have burned and been rebuilt since; the house types here follow later survivors, and the positions of the külliye buildings are approximate.