By Maureen O’Hare, NCS
Istanbul (NCS) — Istanbul skies change with the seasons, the cloudless days and twinkling Bosphorus of summer time edged out by the maritime fogs and flinty seas of the darker months.
However, there’s one place in the metropolis the place the heavens all the time glow a wealthy cerulean: inside the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, popularly often known as the Blue Mosque.
Signifying the sky and the infinite cosmos, blue holds deep non secular that means in Islamic tradition, and it’s the defining hue inside this Seventeenth-century masterpiece of Ottoman structure.
Step exterior and the view isn’t any much less spectacular. Its six minarets and 13 domes are one of the defining options of Istanbul’s celebrated skyline, standing proudly on Seraglio Point, the first of the metropolis’s historic seven hills.
A working mosque, holding 90-minute prayers 5 occasions a day, it’s additionally one of the metropolis’s hottest vacationer points of interest, the place a fixed movement of respectfully attired vacationers enters to admire the house between intervals of worship.
Yet beneath this serene blue cover lies a historical past soaked in blood, fierce rivalry and spiritual scandal.
The mosque was the grand gamble of a teenage sultan who inherited a throne shadowed by royal execution, and who sought to outshine the historic empire the Ottomans had overthrown.
In pursuit of immortality, he would set off an architectural conflict with the holiest web site in Islam — a dramatic conflict that remodeled Istanbul’s skyline endlessly.
Edge of Europe
“When it was built between 1609 and 1616, Istanbul was not a very populated city,” says historian and journey author Saffet Emre Tonguç. The metropolis then often known as Constantinople had served as Ottoman capital since 1453, when the metropolis’s conquest was the remaining loss of life blow to the Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans got here from northwest Anatolia, the peninsula at the western edge of Asia that makes up most of modern-day Turkey. “It’s not just a mosque,” says Tonguç. “They wanted to attract the people from Anatolia, and so they created a place which was also economically interesting for people.”
The mosque is simply one half of a spiritual, charitable and financial complicated, or külliye, a lot of which survives at the moment. Within its partitions stood a madrasa to deal with theology college students, a soup kitchen to feed the poor, a hospital, hospice; the retailers of the Arasta Bazaar, and the mausoleum of the chief who gave the whole district his identify, Sultan Ahmed.
Situated at the at the tip of the Fatih peninsula the place the Bosphorus Strait meets the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, the neighborhood now often known as Sultanahmet marks the literal edge of Europe — and the historic coronary heart of Istanbul.
Today, it’s a cornucopia of UNESCO World Heritage landmarks, from the imperial splendor of Topkapi Palace to the subterranean, cathedral-sized Basilica Cistern, to the 2,500-year-old Obelisk of Theodosius in Sultanahmet Square, the oldest monument on this historic powerhouse metropolis.
This huge sq., now populated by chestnut-sellers and criss-crossing tour teams, was as soon as the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the place chariots raced, public executions occurred, and, in the Nika riots of 532, an estimated 30,000 rebels in opposition to the Byzantine emperor have been massacred.
Long earlier than the Sultan Ahmed Mosque was constructed, floor beneath it was occupied by the fourth-century Palace of Daphne, a main wing of the Great Palace of Constantinople. Though the palace is lengthy gone, mosaics recovered from beneath the Arasta Bazaar are displayed in the Great Palace Mosaics Museum inside the mosque complicated that’s at the moment closed for restoration.
Teenage sultan
At its Seventeenth-century peak, the Ottoman Empire stretched throughout three continents, from the fortified partitions of Vienna to the port of Algiers and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca.
Sultan Ahmed I ascended to the throne at the age of simply 13, after the loss of life of his father, Mehmed III, and simply months after the ruthless execution of his older half-brother Şehzade Mahmud.
Mehmed III was no stranger to the Ottoman custom of fratricide as a answer to succession crises, having already had executioners dispatch his 19 brothers in a mass strangling inside the partitions of Topkapi Palace.
Ahmed I used to be 19 when development started on the grand imperial mosque which he hoped would rival the legendary Hagia Sophia — the imposing Byzantine masterpiece sitting simply 300 meters away
“The most beautiful dome was built in 532 in Istanbul, and for 1,000 years Hagia Sophia was the biggest church of the world,” says Tonguç. “We Turks simply copied the dome architecture of Hagia Sophia.”
While architects at the moment vie for vertical dominance, in the Seventeenth century, it was all about the dome. From England’s St Paul’s Cathedral to India’s Taj Mahal, sacral structure was a world competitors awash with curvaceous crowns.
The Sultan Ahmed mosque was architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa’s masterpiece, marrying Islamic design with Byzantine parts on this excellent expression of Ottoman classical structure.
The most controversial facet of its design was its six minarets, the slender towers which the mosque’s strong-voiced muezzin would ascend 5 occasions a day to challenge the name to prayer. Four hundred years later, this spiritual official nonetheless delivers the melodic chants from the minarets, however with the help of a loudspeaker.
By demanding six minarets as a substitute of the most 4 historically favored by Ottoman sultans, Ahmed I’s development matched the Masjid al-Haram — the single holiest mosque in the world.
“Then the people started the rumors,” says Tonguç. “So they said that this sultan sees himself as equal to the Prophet Mohammed.”
The answer? The sultan is alleged to have commissioned a seventh minaret for the mosque at Mecca, as appeasement for this act of hubris.
Iznik tiles and ostrich eggs
Beneath the minarets, the Blue Mosque follows extra typical Ottoman designs. There’s a prayer corridor topped by a central dome and 4 semi-domes. An expansive courtyard, full with ablution fountain, accommodates overflowing crowds at Friday prayers.
The prayer corridor’s magnificent inside is embellished with greater than 20,000 Iznik tiles, in one of the most stupendous examples of Ottoman tilework wherever.
“In the past, the Ottoman sultans loved the Chinese porcelain,” says Tonguç, however as importing was an costly enterprise, a home tile business developed in the northwestern city of Iznik, which in historic occasions was Nicaea, the early Christian heart from which we get the Nicene Creed.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque pushed manufacturing to its restrict on this increase time for these complicated and colourful tiles, with the business going into decline in the Seventeenth century and ceasing altogether by the 18th.
Blue is the dominant colour in the prayer corridor’s tiles and in the hand-painted floral motifs that adorn its partitions and ceilings. Some 260 home windows, many of that are stained glass, assist flood the house with an nearly celestial gentle.
Huge, cascading, multi-tiered chandeliers grasp from the ceiling, as soon as lit by oil lamps however now electrified. Ostrich eggs stay suspended in lots of of the glass bowls, due to a generally held perception that they repelled spiders.
Sultan Ahmed died of typhus at the age of 27, however his mosque left a legacy that has stood sturdy by way of the centuries.
“Recorded within the Ottoman chronicles of the time, one of the stories is that sultans were meant to, theoretically, really only build huge extravagant constructions like that when they had earned a lot of money in warfare or whatever,” says Caroline Finkel, writer of “Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923.”
For Ahmed I, chastened by the inconclusive Long Turkish War that led to 1606, “there wasn’t such a pot of money,” says Finkel, and he was criticized “for building this place when he really didn’t have the wherewithal.”
Breaking with a brutal legacy
The Arasta Bazaar in the mosque complicated did, of course, present long-term earnings sources. “He increased the economic activity in the place, so that they would get the rents from the shops, and they would maintain the mosque, which meant that the name of the sultan would live forever,” says Tonguç.
Ahmed I’s greatest achievement, other than the Blue Mosque, was breaking with the bloody legacy of royal fratricide that took the life of his half-brother and 19 of his uncles.
When he ascended the throne as a younger teenager, he made the resolution to not order the execution of his three-year-old half-brother. From that time on, Ottoman princes have been completely confined to residences in Topkapi Palace’s Imperial Harem often known as Kafes, which accurately interprets as “cage.”
This act of clemency by Ahmed I used to be to have severe repercussions for the Ottoman empire, explains Tonguç.
Previously, younger princes have been despatched out to cities reminiscent of Amasya, Bursa or Manisa to function regional governors and acquire important expertise as rulers, however now they have been solely reduce off, cloistered inside the palace partitions.
They “were afraid to go to the wars, because they lived in an illusioned world that they could not” go away, says Tonguç, “they didn’t get to see what was the real world outside.”
It was to have important penalties. By the shut of the Seventeenth century, the lengthy, gradual decline of the Ottoman Empire — fueled partially by these cosseted, inexperienced leaders — had begun. This inner decay would finally earn the empire the Nineteenth-century label of “the sick man of Europe” earlier than the centuries-old dynasty got here to an finish in 1922.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, nevertheless, nonetheless stands sturdy.
In 2023, it reopened for prayers after a six-year restoration which was the most complete in its century-long historical past. At the finish of final yr, Pope Leo toured the Blue Mosque, turning into the third pope to take action.
Sultan Ahmed and the many human branches of his elevated household tree had typically brief and brutal lives. However the six-minaretted masterpiece inbuilt his identify may attain in the direction of the heavens, promising serenity and transcendence, for a lot of centuries to come back.
The-NCS-Wire
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