
Our next discovery was the
Yeni Camii, which I thought to be the most beautiful mosque of all that we visited.


Sarah hiding in the corner with her headscarf and loaner skirt.



It was so, so, so, so beautiful. I still can't get over it. We sat in the courtyard for a while after our visit, reveling in its beautificiousness.



Footsies rested, we then made our way to the nearby spice bazaar. On the way we passed this modern art thinghy, which was an interesting contrast to the
Yeni Camii in the background.

The spice bazaar was much smaller than we had anticipated, but I very much enjoyed its colorful displays of silly shoes, spices,
lokum (ie. Turkish Delight), and, yes, self-proclaimed aphrodisiacs.




I was sorely tempted, but we decided to purchase said goods on a later date in a place that was more safe for those who didn't really know how to buy such things.
We were pretty tired by that time, but there were still many hours in the day, so we kept on chugging bottles of water from street vendors (the tap water in Istanbul is NOT potable) and searching out new adventures. More specifically, we hiked up some steep hills in the search of the Suleymaniye Complex, which houses another impressive mosque, a cemetery, and the tombs of Suleyman the Magnificent and his scheming wife, Roxelana. Once we finally got there, we discovered that the mosque was closed for restoration and that the tombs were closed on Mondays. Luckily the cemetery was beautiful enough to make it all worthwhile.
The set-up of the tombstones were really neat - there was a stone slab rectangle over the grave with a vertical carved slab on each side. One was a beautifully intricate design and the other had calligraphy, which I supposed was about the person. My favorite part, however, was the hole in the middle of each horizontal stone between the two vertical slabs. By that I mean my favorite part was the gorgeous rosebush blooming out of the hole over each grave. We managed to time our visit at peak rose blooming season, and the sight of the light stones, calligraphy, and flowers was a splendid one...


...a splendid sight that was only ameliorated by a plethora of kittens! This one in particular amused me for a long time by playing with these little flowers...

...and chasing its tail around and around a fencepost.

This picture reminds me of the famous National Geographic cover photo of the woman with the amazing eyes staring at the camera.

And this wee little ball of purring fluff attracted the adoration of a couple Muslim girls who were also exploring the cemetery. I really enjoyed the wonderful moment we all shared together over this kitten. It just added another point to prove that all humans are still human regardless of culture or religion. We all squeal over cute kittens in the sunshine.


Like I said before, the tomb of Suleyman the Magnificent was closed on Mondays, but that didn't discourage us from doing a little window peeking. It was shiny in there.

Energized by cute baby critters, we set our next destination as the top floor of the Galata Tower in another part of town. We bought a kilo of cherries from a street vendor along the way for only 5 Turkish lira, which is about 3 dollars. They were the most delicious cherries I have ever guzzled, let me tell you that.


We didn't have to wait too long in line for the observation deck at the Galata Tower, though it took a long time to get around the top because there was hardly any room to walk and too many people there at once. I knew that Istanbul was one of the world's bigger cities with something like 12 MILLION people, but the bigness of it didn't actually hit me until it was all spread out before my eyes. Istanbul. Is such. A big city.






Sarah and I apparently had some sort of internal drive that directed us to be in all the best places to experience the calls to prayer, because all of a sudden voices from every single mosque in the city were calling out into the evening air. It was so cool. It was so cool. It was so cool to be however many meters above the city amidst the cacophonous echoes of evening prayer. Incredible. Incredible. We were so lucky. Sarah took a video on her camera, and I'll try to steal it from her and post it here if it came out well enough. I can't describe it any more than that.

That experience was definitely the high point of the day for me (pun slightly intended), though our adventures weren't over yet. I hadn't had great luck finding vegetarian options at the restaurants we'd visited so far, so we decided to go to a vegetarian cafe that was listed in the guidebook that was supposedly somewhere around the tower area. This search led us to the
Istiklal Caddesi, which was a loooooooong and westernized pedestrian zoned street with every department store you could ever desire. The cafe we were looking for was a lot further away than we'd anticipated and we'd already passed three (3) Starbucks by the time we finally got there. Well, the specific cafe in the out-dated guidebook wasn't too be found, but there was a new vegetarian cafe on the same street that we happily hit up instead. It turned out to be phenomenal. I had a kind of delightfully exotic Turkish tortellini with a minty yogurt sauce and Sarah had pasta with fresh saffron sauce. All that plus two Ayran (salty drinking yogurt) cost us something like 14 Turkish Lira, which is something like 9 buckeroos. They didn't have an English menu printed yet and the waitress didn't speak much English herself, so she brought us over the cafe laptop that had the soon-to-be-printed English menu on it. It was cute. I would recommend the place to anyone.
It was when we were hardly able to stand up again after sitting for dinner that we decided we needed to go home and go to bed pronto, so off into the sunset we went. The incredible sky colors had faded by the time I made it onto the roof of the hostel, but the view was still somethin' special.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and guess here that the calligraphy on the tombstones is in Turkish, from when they used to use the Arabic alphabet and not in Arabic. There's one word that I recognize and that is the word for "all". There's another word that I recognize... maybe... that would not be used in that place in a sentence. It doesn't make sense grammatically. And the word at the top is the same in both pictures, so I'm guessing it must be some sort of blessing, or their equivalent of "Rest in Peace", or maybe even a family name.
ReplyDeletePlease tell me that you got a pair of the silly shoes. Hey, remember when we got to the top of that huge bell tower in Brugge just in time for the noon bell? :-D
ReplyDeleteI love you!