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Professor Oleg Grabar, a luminary historian of Islamic visual arts and culture, died on 8 January 2011 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was a much respected and beloved professor and mentor of generations of undergraduate and graduate students who were inspired by his generous spirit, his probing mind, and his intellectually challenging questions about the nature of culture, art, and history. He was invited to lecture widely in many countries, and he authored more than thirty books—several of which have been translated into multiple languages—as well as over one hundred essays in international journals.

Because the Seljuk throne managed to survive for sixty years after the establishment of the Mongol Protectorate in Seljuk Anatolia in 1243, there seems to have been no sudden upheaval in Anatolian society and its formal institutions. Nevertheless, a gradual, and at first rather inconspicuous, transformation took place which resulted in the shifting of centres of both power and the arts to western Anatolia in the centuries that followed. This paper addresses itself to the resulting alterations and innovations in architecture, especially with respect to the directions they gave to subsequent periods in Anatolian—Turkish architecture.The transformations that created the classical period in Ottoman architecture began between approximately 1250 and 1450. As a result of these changes, Anatolia came to derive its models and inspiration no longer from Iran, but from the eastern Mediterranean whose traditions now gave the major direction to the following centuries in Anatolia.2 This shift in orientation was by no means sudden or radical, but rather it was the long-term result of a particular political situation. Nevertheless, a critical date in this evolutionary process seems to be around 1250, the time of the coming of the Mongols.