[Illustration: Entrance to the forecourt of Sultan Baïezid II] [Illustration: Detail of the Süleïmanieh] The place of the mosque in the Turkish community is symbolised, like that of the mediæval cathedral, by its architectural pre-eminence. Mark, however, that Stamboul has half a dozen cathedrals instead of one. It would be hard to overestimate how much of the character of Stamboul depends on the domes and minarets that so inimitably accident the heights between the Golden Horn and the Marmora. And on closer acquaintance the mosques are found to contain almost all that Stamboul has of architectural pretension. They form an achievement, to my mind, much greater than the world at large seems to realise. The easy current dictum that they are merely more or less successful imitations of St. Sophia takes no account of the evolution—particularly of the central dome—which may be traced through the mosques of Konia, Broussa, and Adrianople, and which reaches its legitimate climax in Stamboul. The likelier fact is that the mosque of Stamboul, inspired by the same remote Asiatic impulse as the Byzantine church, absorbed what was proper to it in Byzantine art, refining away the heaviness or overfloridness of the East, until in the hands of a master like Sinan it attained a supreme elegance without losing any of its dignity. Yet it would be a mistake to look for all Turkish architecture in Sinan. The mosques of Atik Ali Pasha and of Sultan Baïezid II are there to prove of what mingled simplicity and nobility was capable an obscure architect of an earlier century. His name is supposed to have been Haïreddin, and he, first among the Turks, used the monolithic shaft and the stalactite capital. How perfect they are, though, in the arcades of Baïezid! Nothing could be better in its way than the forecourt of that mosque, and its inlaid minarets are unique of their kind. Nor did architecture die with Sinan. Yeni Jami, looking at Galata along the outer bridge, is witness thereof. The pile of the Süleïmanieh, whose four minarets catch your eye from so many points of the compass, is perhaps more masculine. But the silhouette of Yeni Jami, that mosque of princesses, has an inimitable grace. The way in which each structural necessity adds to the general effect, the climactic building up of buttress and cupola, the curve of the dome, the proportion of the minarets, could hardly be more perfect. Although brought up in the vociferous tradition of Ruskin, I am so far unfaithful to the creed of my youth as to find pleasure, too, in rococo mosques like Zeïneb Sultan, Nouri Osmanieh, and Laleli Jami. And the present generation, under men like Vedad Bey and the architects of the _Evkaf_, are reviving their art in a new and interesting direction.