Old Istanbul – Greg and Mandy's Travels

I learned a few things today.

Firstly, I learned that whilst anybody can build a mosque in Turkey, they can have at most one minaret (that’s the tower that they used to climb to call the faithful to prayer, but now prefer to have speakers mounted on to save their legs). If a mosque has four or more minarets then they have been constructed by a Sultan. Every Sultan worth his saffron (did you know that saffron is more expensive than gold?) would commission his own mosque as his own tribute to himself, and it would bear his name.

So there is actually no such thing as the Blue Mosque, although that’s what the people call it. It’s actually the Sultan Ahmed mosque. There are mosques all over the place dedicated to all of the sultans, and there were lots of them. Each mosque takes about 20 years or so to build, and even the current President who is definitely not a sultan has commissioned one. Imagine how many mosques there would be in Australia if every Prime Minister commissioned one!

Secondly I learned that palaces aren’t the only buildings in their complex. Along with the palace, the Sultan built schools, hospitals, wells, markets, and a harem. In fact, the harem of the old Topkapi Palace has now been turned into one of the faculties of the Istanbul University. Reminds me a lot of Monash University in the 70s.

Thirdly I learned that the purpose of the harem was to produce a steady supply of males who could potentially succeed the Sultan when he died. All male heirs were given significant jobs in the Ottoman Empire, like ruling a province or running the take away kebab business. When the Sultan died, the most able heir (not the first born) was chosen as the next Sultan, and all other male heirs killed. Now there is a performance incentive. Just imagine being poor Prince Edward!

Lastly I learned that food in general in Turkey is very cheap. The Big Mac index here is AU$3.75, which is the cheapest I can ever remember. In Australia it costs about $9 at the moment.

We started our tour of the Old Town of Istanbul at the Haga Sophia (an orthodox cathedral repurposed as a mosque by the Ottomans), then went past the German Fountain (a gift to Turkey by the country who caused them to lose WWI and also their empire), the Hippodrome with the Serpent Column ‘brought’ to Istanbul from Delphi (funny, the Greeks told us it was stolen), the Blue Mosque (which is undergoing renovation), the Grand Bazaar (which really is huge), a Shisha cafe for a coffee, and the Suleymaniye Mosque (where they were filming the Whirling Dervishes), before finishing at the Spice Market.

A very late lunch at the Pudding Shop, which was an icon in the 70s for young long-haired beach bums in VW Combis looking for lifts or passengers to go across Europe with, long before the term backpackers was coined.