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Published: March 5th 2010
Ottoman Istanbul This blog focuses on the Ottoman sights of Istanbul. As you can see from just glancing at the pictures, they are gorgeous. Our last blog focused on the Byzantine sights of Istanbul. We’ll do one last Istanbul blog that gives a taste what Istanbul is like today.
Ottoman Istanbul, by Paul The Ottoman Empire. In the last blog we talked about Byzantium or Constantinople, which was essentially a Greek Christian city and the center of a huge and important empire. In 1453, Byzantium was conquered by the Ottoman Turks (Muslims), who changed the name of the city to Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1299 to 1922; Istanbul was its capital from 1453 to 1922.
At its height in the 1500s and 1600s, the Ottoman Empire stretched from Iran to Algeria along the eastern and southern Mediterranean, including all of Egypt and the Middle East, and a significant slice of the Arabian Peninsula (including Mecca). It also included all of southeast Europe (e.g., present-day Greece, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and so on). The Ottomans continually knocked on Western Europe’s door; they made several massive sieges of Vienna, but never conquered it.
For the first half of the 1500s, the Ottomans were the world’s foremost naval and military force. After the 1600s, the empire slowly declined, for many varied reasons.
In North American and European popular culture, the Ottoman Empire may be most well-known for its sultans (the political heads of the empire) and their harem (the sultans’ many concubines and wives).
Ottoman Istanbul. At the height of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul was perhaps the most important, cosmopolitan city in the world. The architectural and artistic legacy of the Ottomans, when layered over the similarly rich yet different legacy of the Byzantines, makes Istanbul one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen.
Many of the most beautiful buildings in Istanbul date from the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. The most noticeable Ottoman sights in Istanbul include the many imperial mosques, the Topkapi Palace (palace of the sultans), and the beautiful tiles which you see in many of the pictures.
Ottoman mosques. At its height, the Ottoman Empire had a masterful architect, Mimar Sinan. Before coming to Istanbul, I had never heard of Sinan, but his buildings are stunning. The most famous Sinan buildings
are a series of mosques across Istanbul (with his masterpiece actually being in nearby Edirne), but he designed and built literally every kind of building or structure you can imagine. The Ottomans and Turks have done a good job of preserving the best of their architecture, so you can see the greatest hits from the 1500s as you walk around Istanbul today.
Many imperial Ottoman mosques look a bit like updated versions of the Byzantine Hagia Sofia, which we mentioned in the last blog. Hagia Sofia was the imperial Byzantine church, built in 537. It was converted into a mosque by the Ottomans in the 1400s. You can see much of the Hagia Sofia in the Ottoman mosques, and yet the Ottoman mosques are not derivative or copy-cat - they are clearly something new, superb, and beautiful.
The larger imperial mosques in Istanbul were once huge religious and social service centers, with a neighborhood around them. For example, one of the larger Istanbul mosques was surrounded by a hospital, primary school, public baths, four religious schools, a guesthouse, an Islamic law school, and a public kitchen that served food to the poor. Today many of these supporting buildings
have been torn down as Istanbul has modernized, but one large mosque complex remains much as it was in the 1500s (with the supplementary buildings turned into shops and restaurants, among other things).
The classic imperial mosques have much the same pattern. You walk in through a front gate, into a large open, square, cobblestone courtyard. The courtyard is surrounded by walkways or hallways that are open to the courtyard and covered by columns and graceful arches. In the center of the courtyard is an ablutions fountain, for washing before entering the mosque. The size of the courtyard in the larger mosques is surprising. They are massive. Some of the courtyard pictures here hint at how big they feel.
As you look up from the courtyard, the mosque looms above you with all of its domes and half-domes, rising up on top of each other like a series of elegantly solidified soap bubbles. Rocket ship minarets tower above the courtyard. The minarets are where the muezzin (a mosque worker) would sing or chant out the call to prayer, five times a day, before there were speakers and amplifiers. (Now the call to prayer is chanted or sung through
a microphone, and goes out through speakers in the minarets.)
All in all, the mosque courtyards are often more enticing than the interiors. But it’s always worth going inside the mosques. To go in, everyone takes off their shoes, and women and girls must cover their heads. The mosques provide scarves as head-covers; it’s also fine for Ella and May to just pull up their raincoat hoods.
The insides are usually darkish, because the domed interior is simply too big to keep well-lit, and there are not enough windows to let in much natural light. Inevitably in the large imperial mosques, there is a feel of a huge, open, cavernous space, much like the Byzantine Hagia Sofia.
The interiors are decorated with either tiles or fresh paint. There is Muslim calligraphy, but no paintings or representations of people. There are these large, wide, round, low-hanging chandelier things, hard to describe, which hang suspended through the massive open space from the domes. You can see the rings and half-rings of lights in some of the pictures of mosque interiors.
Mosques are always quiet. They’re not crowded, because tourists aren’t allowed in during prayer time. So they feel
dark, and solemn, and yawning, and beautiful, like a massive chamber that you’ve stumbled upon deep in a cave.
Topkapi Palace. The Topkapi Palace was the main sultan’s palace at the height of the Ottoman Empire. It reminds me of the Forbidden City in Beijing or Versailles in Paris. Well, sort of.
The glory of the Topkapi is its tiles, which you can see in many of the pictures. The most beautiful part by far is the women’s quarters, the harem (pronounced ha-
reem with the accent on the second syllable - which I never knew before coming here).
In the harem, there is room after room covered with gorgeously colorful tiled walls. Most of the rooms are smallish, and it all feels sort of the opposite of the mosques. The huge imperial mosques are dark, cavernous, somber - sort of manly and serious. The rooms of the harem are small, livable, elegant, precious, curlicued, and flowery - much more playful and girly.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a building as pretty to me as those Topkapi harem rooms. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a tourist sight as thoroughly fascinating as the Topkapi as
a whole. The Topkapi is wowie-wow-wow-wow.
Ottoman cosmopolitanism. One thing that I find interesting about Istanbul under the Ottomans was its cosmopolitanism. In the 1500s and 1600s, Istanbul had significant, sizable communities of literally every group of people from across North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe living together in different neighborhoods across the city. The Ottomans were tolerant and welcoming, more so than most European Christian nations or empires. For instance, when Catholic Spain forcibly expelled its Jews in 1492, the Spanish Jews were welcomed by the Ottomans, and many settled in Istanbul.
Istanbul still feels tolerant and open. Visiting Istanbul and Malaysia on this trip has really made us appreciate how gentle, warm, relaxed, smiling, welcoming, tolerant, open, friendly, funny, fun-loving, contented, contemporary, forward-thinking, and fashionable some Muslim cultures and countries are. Our US stereotypes and biases related to Muslims are wildly unfounded, unfair, and mistaken, at least based on our experiences in Istanbul and Malaysia.
It’s funny, though: present-day Istanbul doesn’t feel cosmopolitan, especially compared to most of the places we visited in Asia (and even compared to Asheville and North Carolina). Just strolling through the city, it appears that most of the people
in Istanbul now are Turks. Istanbul seems homogenous, as homogenous as anywhere I’ve been. This homogeneity gives it a closed-in-on-itself, slightly provincial feel - especially compared to the similarly-sized cities we visited in Asia (which are flamingly global in the ways that people think and act).
I’m not sure what happened to Istanbul’s racial and ethnic diversity over the years. I guess the lure of coming to a great world city drew people here in the 1500s, but there’s not as much to draw people here now. Perhaps in 2010, cities like New York City or London or Hong Kong are the equivalent of what Istanbul was in the 1500s - high on the list of cities where people from all over the world go to try to make a better life.
What I Like about Ottoman Istanbul, by May We have seen a lot of very interesting things in Istanbul. I loved the mosaics and the oldness of the Byzantine sights. There are two main things about the Ottoman sights that wow me. First, I love the tiles. Second, I love going in mosques.
The Tiles Paul has taken some great pictures of the
tiles. I went through the Istanbul pictures for myself and copied my favorites into my own folder. When I looked back at those pictures they were largely of tiles, a few of the girls, but mainly the tiles. I love the bright blue of the tiles. I also love the geometry and symmetry of them. They fit together like puzzles and are still shiny and bright after hundreds of years.
The tiles came from a nearby town named Iznik. They are called Iznik tiles. The Ottomans really liked Chinese porcelain, but they didn’t have the right clay for porcelain so they made up their own ceramic that was white and shiny like porcelain.
Many of the buildings (which are mainly mosques) that we’ve been in from the Ottoman times are tiled with Iznik tiles. The walls and sometimes the ceilings are covered with square tiles. All the tiles are approximately 8 inch squares painted very delicately with geometric or floral designs. The designs are very elaborate and they link together so that it’s nice to look up close at one particular tile to see the detail and also it’s nice to step way back and look at the
whole. Different designs will be on different sections of the wall so my eyes stay really busy trying to see it all.
We went to a smallish mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque. It was on a busy market street selling brooms, mops and hardware. The door way to this mosque was in a nondescript old crumbly stone wall. We had to climb up about forty stairs that wound up above the street level. The mosque didn’t have a huge courtyard but did have a covered walkway that led to its door. Inside was also small but incredibly tiled. It was tiled so densely it made me dizzy. It was my favorite tile place. My mom, who has been to Istanbul, suggested we visit it and I’m glad she did. The blue of those tiles is my favorite color now.
The Mosques Before Istanbul, I had been in one mosque that I can remember. It was big and nice in Singapore. I’ve been in several more mosques in Istanbul and they’re my favorite buildings here. I would never try to see all the mosques here, there are too many, but it’s been fun to visit the ones we
have.
Muslims are called to pray five times every day so the mosques are open sun up to sun down. There is usually a care taker at each mosque who checks to make sure we take off our shoes and cover our heads. They are never crowded but there are always people going in and out. Some of the visitors are Muslims who aren’t necessarily there to pray but are just visiting, I guess. Some of the visitors are non-Muslims, just there to be wowed like me.
Mosques here seem bigger and airier than old churches that I’ve visited in Europe. They’re more open, with domed and half domed ceilings. Sometimes there are stained glass windows but they’ve got geometric designs in the glass not people. And the walls, of course, are often tiled. Did I mention that I really like the tiles?
There aren’t places to sit in the mosques (like pews in churches) so we don’t stay that long. Muslims kneel on the floor to pray so the floors are covered in thick carpet (which feels good to our shoe-less feet) We usually walk around as much as we can (sometimes the front of the
mosque is blocked off to non Muslims). Paul takes a lot of pictures. I look around at all the tiles. Then we go out and put our shoes back on and go back out to the crowded, crazy market street. Mosques are quiet spaces in a fairly hectic city. I like going in them a lot.
We're continuing to enjoy Istanbul a lot. It's a great place to visit, and there's a lot to learn by being here.
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Marian
non-member comment
Ottoman blog
This was a beautiful blog! It does make me sorry that we didn't visit the harem at the Topkapi Mosque, however, because it is better preserved than the parts we did visit. We, too, loved the tiles! The tile of Turkey reminded me a little of Mexico which also has a great tile tradition. Ottoman influence in Spain may have passed on to the Spanish as they conquered Mexico. Who knows? Marian