Turkey: Istanbul: Blue Mosque

After the Hagia Sophia we walked a few hundred meters and came upon the Blue Mosque. It is named for all of the blue tiles on the inside of it - over 20,000 of them. It was built in the early 17th century and is still used as a mosque today. The people of Turkey (Turkey is 98% Muslim) pray 5 times per day and so the mosque shuts down during all of those times (dawn, 1pm, 4:30pm, 7:15pm, and 8:30pm). You learn the times fairly quickly because at these times people come onto loudspeakers set all around every mosque and call people to prayer in arabic. It can be quite loud. I think it must be hard to pray all five times every day ... you can't possibly have enough time to get very far away from the mosque between the two last prayer times of the day. Why even bother leaving after the 7:15pm prayer? Just hang around another hour for the next one and then go home.

Friday is the big holy day when everybody tries to get to the mosque to pray at 1pm. This special service can be up to 2 hours long and is the most important one of the week. Cenk left us on our own for a bit on Friday at 1pm so he could pray because as a tour guide of course he doesn't make all 5 prayer times every day of the week so he makes sure to make it on Friday.

And of course the Blue Mosque was ridiculously crowded! Here we are standing in it. You have to take off your shoes to go inside of it so that's what we have in our hands. You also have to have shoulders covered (and head too though it's not required of tourists).



Here are some pics of the inside. We tried to get some closeups of the tiles but they came out pretty blurry, unfortunately.



You can see some tiles around the windows:



Closeup of the walls:



Ceiling shots. All the chandeliers were suspended from the ceiling which was neat:





And views from the outside. It has six spires which is more than any other mosque in Turkey but was apparently done by mistake. The builder was told to build gold spires but in Turkish the word for gold is very similar to the word for six and so he built six spires instead.