After completing our tour of the legendary Aya Sofya, we roamed around in the neighbourhood - and visited the Sultan Ahmet Camii, or the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, a historic mosque. This mosque is popularly known as the Blue Mosque - named after the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior
Ottoman pride was at an all time low after the 1606 peace treaty of Zsitvatorok between the Turks and the Hapsburg Empire. The crushing loss in the 1603-1618 war with Persia was another blow.
But as an attempt to salvage Turkish pride and reassert Ottoman power, Sultan Ahmet I, decided to build a big mosque in Istanbul. The mosque construction was paid for by the Ottoman treasury, while his predecessors had paid for their mosques with loot from their conquests. This caused anguish among the Muslim jurists.
The mosque was built on the site of the palace of the Byzantine emperors, in front of the basilica Aya Sofya, which by then had become the primary imperial mosque in Istanbul, and the hippodrome, a site of significance. The mosque was built on the foundations of the old Byzantine palace.
The Sultan Ahmet has one main dome, six minarets, and eight secondary domes. The design is an amalgamation of Byzantine and Islamic elements, as a result of two centuries of Ottoman conquest. The architect, Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, drew on the ideas of his master Sinan, and incorporated Byzantine Christian elements of the neighboring Aya Sofya.
The sheer size of the building was indeed impressive...
We sat for a while in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque...
This reminds me of the wonder that used to appear in the Microsoft strategy game, Age of Empires...
The main dome...
The ornately decorated interior...
We were allowed entry in a section cordoned off for non-Muslims. And women were given scarves to cover their hair...
Tourists soaking in the peace of the place...
The mosque is known as the Blue Mosque because of the blue tiles surrounding the walls of interior design. These handmade İznik style ceramic tiles, made at Iznik (the ancient Nicaea), come in more than fifty different tulip designs. The tiles at lower levels are traditional in design, while at upper levels, the tiles have representations of flowers, fruit and cypresses...
The upper levels of the interior of the mosque are dominated by blue paint. More than 200 stained glass windows with intricate designs admit natural light, in addition to chandeliers...
The centre dome...
There was quite a rush here...
As we exit, and see the devotees pray, we could only appreciate the ingenuity of the architects, artisans and engineers of that time to build such a structure, a visual treat, a rhapsody of devotion and art coming together...
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