Of all her fleeting greatness shorn!
The walls are covered with exquisite blue tiles, with beautiful designs of almond and tulip. Happily this türbeh has not been restored as have so many of them. It remains a gem of the best Moslem art. The group of buildings seen as one descends from the hill on which the Seraskierat stands, or from the tower, has a charming effect. The cypresses mingling with the domes and minarets make the most peaceful scene that Stambûl can show. In the city of trees and gardens, of domes and minarets, this seems the picture typical of the whole as the Moslems have made it. Here is, one feels, the true poetic East, the home of the poets we have read. We might be in the Arabian Nights,
Whilst there o'er mosque and minaret
That rise against the sunset glow,
broods the great calm of a nation of fatalists. It is not the "purple East" we see, but the soft, somnolent, sensuous splendour of a great repose, or may be a great decay.
Third of the great mosques I should place that of Ahmed, which, with its large enclosures, encroaches on the old Hippodrome. It may well be considered the most truly oriental of them all. "The masterpiece of Asiatic art" some call it, the highest achievement of Mussulman architecture. Something it owes to its position, fronted by the long, broad, open space; something, certainly, to those who know, to its historic associations. But undoubtedly in its general plan and in the detail of its decoration it is more clearly than the others a work of the genius of the East.
COURT OF THE MOSQUE OF AHMED I.