A Turkish women hand making a silk Turkish carpet. She has been working on this design for over a month and it will take up to another year to complete.
The Patriarch, which is considered the main headquarters for the Greek Orthodox Church
The front entrance of the Dolambache Palace
Spice Bazaar, which includes nearly 400 shops containing a variety of Turkish Delights, Spices, Teas, Soaps and more!
Traditional Turkish cuisine from a local restaurant in Istanbul
While exploring Istanbul, some of us decided to to get into the Turkish spirit.
Hagia Sophia translates to english as “cathedral of divine wisdom”. This was originally built as a cathedral and was amazingly finished in just 5 years, 11 months, and 16 days. In 1453 however, the cathedral was transformed into a mosque , and nowadays is a museum. The minarets were added onto the cathedral during its transformation into a mosque. What makes it so interesting today is that you can see original decoration from when it was a cathedral, and how it was modified in order to fit the criteria of a mosque. In Islam, it is cusomtary to not have any images or figures of humans inside a mosque as to avoid idolization, however, cathedrals are a lot of times loaded with human figures and depictions. So, during the transformation, any human figure was covered up and hidden so you could not tell that they were ever even there. Over time however, due to weather and age, parts of the coverings began to fall off and the images and mosaics of relgious figures began to emerge. Today, tourists can see both the original decorations of the cathedral and how the Turks transformed it into a mosque.
This is the Mosque of Sultan Ahmet, more commonly known as the Blue Mosque. We learned that in the Islmaic religion, muslims are called to prayer 5 times a day: at sunrise, at the sun’s highest point (noon), midafternoon, sunset, and dusk (no glimps of the sun anymore). The call was originally sung from the minarets of the mosque so that the muezzin’s voice could be heard from far away, but today the muezzin sings into a microphone and their voice comes out of speakers placed up on the minarets (minarets are the tall tower looking things). It was interesting to hear the call when we were walking because there are 3000+ mosques in Istanbul, so we could hear multiple mosque’s callings. Cenan, our tour guide, informed us that muessin’s used to have competitions to see who’s call could be louder. Each prayer session lasts about 10-15 minutes. The men line up in rows touching shoulders closest to the front of the mosque, while the women have a seperate section either in the balcony or behind the men where they pray. It is costumary when entering a mosque to remove your shoes, and for women to cover their hair, so people walked around with their shoes in a plastic bag. Each mosque has either a fountain or another water source for Muslim’s to cleanse before each prayer. We visited many mosques in Istanbul, but this one is the best known.
Professor Das is making me test this site to see if it works.