Bringing Turkish Style to Europe

For hundreds of years, the aesthetics of the Ottoman Empire fascinated Europeans. As art historian Deborah Howard writes, that included taking inspiration for buildings in Istanbul, from churches to bathhouses, to create cosmopolitan spaces back home.

Following his armies’ conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman sultan Mehmed II famously transformed the Hagia Sophia, built as a Christian church, into a mosque. In the decades that followed, Howard writes, new Ottoman mosques incorporated related elements...