The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne is the building the architect Sinan, by then over eighty, called "my masterwork," and it structurally resolves a goal he had pursued all his life — surpassing the dome of Hagia Sophia.

Where at the Süleymaniye the dome is supported by half-domes, at the Selimiye Sinan sets up a different, bolder scheme: the single great dome, 31.3 metres across, rests directly on a baldachin formed by eight great piers. The interior, gathered under one continuous dome undivided by half-domes, departs in its unity and breadth from Hagia Sophia's fragmented volume. The eight piers are absorbed into the walls and pushed to the edges of the space; the floor thus becomes an almost unobstructed octagonal hall, and the dome seems to float.

The lateral thrust of the dome is carried to the ground by the piers and external buttresses; the four slender, tall minarets at the corners both balance the silhouette and brace the building vertically. By keeping the dome's diameter equal to or slightly greater than Hagia Sophia's — and gathering it under a far more unified single volume — Sinan answers a thousand-year architectural rivalry. The Selimiye is thus the structural summit of Ottoman classical dome architecture.