So, after visiting the Sulamaniye & Beyazid Mosques, I walked in the direction of Sultanahmet and the Aya Sofya (Haghia Sophia.)
Along the way I passed the Nurosmaniye Mosque. It's just beside the Grand Bazaar. It's a beautiful Baroque-style mosque.
After the mosque, I walked along and found a book fair. It was centered around the old Hippodrome of Constantinople. From the book fair there was a great view of the Blue Mosque. It's called the Sultan Ahmet Camii, or the Sultan Ahmet Mosque. That's why the area is called Sultanahmet. It's a fairy-tale type of building with all the minarets! In the evening the lights that are strung along and between the minarets are lit and it's really amazingly beautiful.
Then you turn and you can see the Aya Sofya. It was built in the 700's, if you can believe that. It sits above the hill it sits on and you can see it from everywhere. I can't even imagine what people sailing into Constantinople hundreds of years ago - it must have seemed like a completely unbelievable building!
When Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror captured Constantinople, this church was turned into a mosque. When Turkey became a republic, Ataturk (the Father of the Turks is what that means) turned it onto a museum is a gesture of reconciliation, secularism and modernity. In the picture below the dome and the minaret in the distance is the Aya Sofya.
This is the Aya Sofya.
And this is a view of the Blue Mosque from inside the Aya Sofya, looking across the domes of the tombs that now surround the Aya Sofya.
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