Sultanic Seat

After visiting the Sultan Ahmed mosque and Ayasofya, our last guided portion of our Turkey tour was a visit to Topkapi Palace. Topkapi is not a single, ornate European-style palace as one might imagine from its name. Rather, it is a large complex containing many buildings and mosques, which acted as a city within a city where the Sultan, his family, and his immediate retinue of several thousand servants and advisers lived. It is a short walk from Ayasofya and part of its grounds border the scenic and strategic Bosphorus strait that is the sole exit to the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean.

The basic rule for photography at Topkapi is that, if it's inside, one cannot take pictures. So some of the neater things like Sultan's collection of armor, china, jewels, the Topkapi dagger (subject of the 1964 heist film Topkapi) and the large Spoonmaker diamond were off limits. Generally one can see a purported skull fragment and forearm of John the Baptist in the Topkapi Treasury with the other flashy Sultany baubles, but they were on loan elsewhere on 15 November. So if you're curious about such things, you'll have to settle for non-Greggy pictures from the web like these:


Dagger Pix

Spoonmaker Pix

Pieces of John


After the visit to the palace, we had our final group lunch at a restaurant with a beautiful view of the Bosphorus. After that, time to wander around the Grand Bazaar was scheduled, but I had too much work to do and too little interest, since I knew I was coming back to Istanbul in the near future.

Here are more pictures of my tour of Topkapi Palace.

Where's Allah? (Fun with Arabic Script)

The Arabic word for "Allah" is featured prominently in the big circles in each of the three pictures below (the long vertical line followed by 4 wavy squiggles of about half that size). Now that you know the form of such a prominent Arabic word, you can see if you can find it in longer samples of Arabic script, such as the rectangle of script below and to the left of the circle in the top and bottom pictures.

Go on, try it! It's fun!

Murch of Wisdom, Chosque of Light

Hey?! You Muslims stuck your mosque in my Justinian-era Cathedral! Yeah, well you Christians keep trying to convert my 500-year-old mosque back into a church! Wait, it's neither a church or a mosque -- it's two, two great faiths that go great together! It's a....

A museum. In 1935 good ol' Mustafa Kemal and the secular Republic of Turkey put an end to all the bickering about what Ayasofya (aka Hagia Sofia) should rightfully be and declared it a secular museum. So now you can go in and look around without removing your shoes. This enforced secularity of Ayasofya is evidently a big point. Pope John Paul II refrained from making any prayers or religious gestures during his visit and there were worries about whether Benedict would observe the protocol in his recent visit.

Also when the Ottoman conquerers moved in, they plastered over most of the Christian icons to protect them from defacement. In the last century, many of these have been rediscovered and uncovered intact.

Here are some more pictures from Ayasofya.

Don't they make my renowned mosque blue?

On Thursday 15 November, we did our last set of guided tours starting at the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (aka the Blue Mosque) in Istanbul. Supposedly French visitors were so taken with the rich blue-green color of some of the tile on the inside of this mosque that they named the color after the Turks or "turquoise".

For more pictures, click here.

Iyi Christmaslar!

(Roughly "Merry Christmas!" in Turkish.)

Wishing all my family and friends a Merry Christmas!

Faraway Family

During my stay in Istanbul, Zikri has been a kind host to me and he and his family have adopted me while I'm here. Zikri's younger daughter Gökçen and her husband Hüssein are in the first picture. Zikri's wife Aynur who has made me dozens of yummy home-cooked meals and desserts is in the middle picture. And the newest addition to Zikri's family is his 2+-year-old grandson Orhun in the bottom picture.

Thank you, Zikri, Aynur, Gökçen, Hüssein, and Orhun for your friendship, help, and hospitality!

Marmara Moon Mars

Mars has been very bright the last few nights; last night it was very close to the full moon (last picture) and the skies were clear over Marmara University (the sign of which is in the first two photos)