The Mimar (architect) Sinan was born to a Christian family:
The son of Greek or Armenian Christian parents, Sinan entered his father’s trade as a stone mason and carpenter. In 1512, however, he was drafted into the Janissary corps. Sinan, whose Christian name was Joseph, converted to Islam, and he began a lifelong service to the Ottoman royal house and to the great sultan Süleyman I (reigned 1520–66) in particular. Following a period of schooling and rigorous training, Sinan became a construction officer in the Ottoman army, eventually rising to chief of the artillery.
How do we know his Christian heritage? For one, he himself asserts that in his autobiography.
The autobiographical memoirs of the Ottoman chief architect Sinan (d. 1588), narrated shortly before his death to the poet-painter Mustafa Sa{i Çelebi (d. 1595– 96), have come down to us in five versions.
Written in the second half of the 1580s, these five texts on Sinan’s life and works are unique sources without any equivalent in the history of Islamic architecture. Each of them includes a brief biographical section, outlining Sinan’s recruitment as a Christian boy from a village of Kayseri under Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) and his initial training in carpentry as a novice in Istanbul, followed by his promotion through the ranks of the Janissaries during the reign of Sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–66), whom he arduously accompanies to “many a ghaza” (war on behalf of Islam) as a foot soldier, building several bridges and war ships along the way.
–– Howard Crane & Esra Akin: "Sinan’s Autobiographies. Five Sixteenth-Century Texts. Introductory Notes, Critical Editions, And Translations", Studies and Sources in Islamic Art and Architecture. Supplements to Muqarnas, Volume 11, Brill: Leiden, Boston, 2006.
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It might be possible that being drafted at such an old age – ca 22, details on date of birth being murky – he had retained a bit of Christian 'esprit', knowledge and aesthetic values, despite the Janissary training, which in modern descriptions appears like a thorough rinse of brain washing. Sort of ingrained spiritual heritage?
That is of course mere speculation. And an essentialist attribution, naturally, with dubious plausibility.
What is at hand are sources, like biographies or
Gülru Necipoğlu examines completely afresh the centrality of Sinan, chief imperial Ottoman architect between 1538 and 1588, in the creation of what she calls “architectural culture.” Based on a wide variety of primary sources—including some not previously considered from the point of view of architectural history—this is the first exhaustive study offering a wealth of insights into Sinan’s architecture within the context of its own intellectual, political, and religious milieus.
The Age of Sinan is a fundamental reconstruction and analysis of Ottoman cultural history focusing on religious architecture, which was integral to and profoundly altered by the unprecedented social, political, and aesthetic reforms during the reign of Süleyman I (r. 1526–66), and on the role of Sinan in the implementation and accomplishments of these reforms through his stylistic codification of the congregational and Friday mosque. Necipoğlu argues that Sinan “developed a stratified system of architectural representation, which relied on a standardised vocabulary of repetitive canonical forms to express the status hierarchies of his patrons and cultural prestige of the empire’s centre over its provinces” (20). Its concern is therefore with distinguishing the different typological schemes developed by Sinan for his monumental mosques with centralised domed baldachins. These are commonly divided by architectural historians into three main categories according to the ways in which their domes sit—i.e., on square, hexagonal, or octagonal support systems—a classification that is considerably expanded by Necipoğlu to give a fuller account of Sinan’s stylistic dexterity. The author traces the transitions from one type to another in order thereby to reflect systematically on the nature of sixteenth-century Ottoman imperialism, architectural patronage, and on the unwritten rules of “decorum.” The term decorum here refers to a concept of visual distinction, which aims to demonstrate how the typological differences among Sinan’s mosques came to represent social distances between his patrons.
–– Nebahat Avcioğlu review of –– Gülru Necipoglu: "The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire", Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
As such it is neither Christian rudimentary, nationally Ottoman or Turkish nor fundamentally Islamic. It is a Eastern renaissance, Rumi-style. Building a fusion on a foundation that has been fed from all sides. That makes his birth place or 'native' religion quite secondary to other influences on his style, soaking all in whatever was available and 'good'. And the remixing it to style.
In contrast to the essentialist speculation, earlier Ottoman buildings were more Christian in style than Sinan's:
In similar fashion, TM confidently asserts that the Mosque of Øehzade Mehmed in Istanbul (the chief architect’s first royal commission from Sultan Süleyman) surpasses in artistic refinement early Ottoman sultanic mosques awkwardly constructed in the “style of Hagia Sophia” and thereby constitutes a preliminary “experiment” further elaborated in the Süleymaniye.
–– Crane & Akin
