Around the Mosque of the Conqueror - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 233

so as to approach the mosque from the western side of the great outer
courtyard. The huge mosque complex built by Sultan Mehmet the
Conqueror was the most extensive and elaborate in Istanbul, and
indeed in the whole of the Ottoman Empire. In addition to the great
mosque with its beautiful courtyard and its graveyard with türbes, the
küllliye consisted of eight medreses and their annexes, a tabhane or
hospice, a huge imaret, a hospital, a kervansaray, a primary school, a
library and a hamam. It was laid out over a vast, almost square area -
about 325 metres on a side - with almost rigid symmetry, and Evliya
Çelebi says of it: “When all these buildings, crowded together, are
seen from a height above, they alone appear like a town full of lead-
covered domes.” It occupies approximately the site of the famous
Church of the Holy Apostles and its attendant buildings. This church,
which was already partially in ruins at the time of the Conquest, was
used as a source of building materials for the construction of Fatih's
külliye.
The complex is thought to have been built by Sinan the Elder
between 1463 and 1470; the dates are given in the great inscription
over the entrance portal. There is much controversy but almost no
knowledge about who this architect was. He has various sobriquets:
Atik, the Elder; Azatlı, the Freedman; or (by Evliya) Abdal, the Holy
Idiot. he second of these names suggests that he could not have
been a Turk; on the other hand, his identification with an otherwise
unknown Byzantine architect named Christodoulos, which is generally
accepted by western writers, rests only on the late and suspect authority
of Prince Demetrius Cantemir. If he was indeed a Greek, however,
he could not possibly have been a “Byzantine architect”: one cannot
for a moment believe that, in the fifteenth century, there was any
Byzantine architect capable of building a dome 26 metres in diameter.
He must have been a Greek boy from the European provinces of the
Empire taken up in a devşirme (annual levy of youths) and trained
in an Ottoman school of architecture. His gravestone is extant in
the garden of the little mosque he built as his own vakıf, or pious
foundation, Kumrulu Mescidi (see Chapter 13). But from this we
learn only that he was an architect - no mention of the Fatih complex
- and, curiously enough, that he was executed in the year after it