Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire

by William Holden Hutton

AN ENTRANCE TO THE MOSQUE OF AHMED

It covers a vast space. The great court which surrounds it seems constantly to be filled with a great market. It is in the heart of life: crowds are constantly passing through, pilgrims from S. Sophia, travellers who have turned in from the Hippodrome. The air of the buyers and sellers is more dilettante than that of the serious folk who make their homely purchases among the stalls outside the great mosque of Mohammed II. This seems an oriental scene decked out for your amusement. But the place has a long and tragic history. Part of the area covered by the buildings of the mosque was once occupied by the great palace of the Emperors; part was the Hippodrome; here too, probably, was the Augustæum. It was not for more than a hundred years after the conquest that the Turks built upon this site. Then (1608-14) Ahmed I. determined to raise a memorial of his piety finer than any of his predecessors had achieved, and if it might be, by a propitiatory offering, to stay the decline which had already begun to fall upon the Empire. He worked himself at the building, it is said, and paid the workmen with his own hands. The fore-court has a beautiful fountain. The interior of the mosque itself is larger than the Suleimaniyeh. Its fault is sameness. Fergusson, whose judgment is not always to be quoted, may here speak without contradiction. "If the plan were divided into quarters, each of the four quarters would be found to be identical, and the effect is consequently painfully mechanical and prosaic. The design of each wall is also nearly the same; they have the same number of windows spaced in the same manner, and the side of the Kibleh[64] is scarcely more richly decorated than the others." The prevailing blue of the whole becomes oppressive. There are some exquisite tiles; but the effect of the whole mosque is spoilt, like that of Suleiman, by the paint. Yet with all its defects the size makes the mosque magnificent. "A hall nearly two hundred feet square, with a stone roof supported by only four great fluted piers, is a grand and imposing object." Fergusson's judgment must be accepted.

At the same time there are many points that no one who has seen them will ever forget. One is the view as you stand under the great columns of the arched court and look up at the almost innumerable domes, rising dome upon dome to the great central cupola that dominates them all, the one minaret that you see breaking the monotonous gradation of the domes by its sheer, sharp ascent into the sky. Another is the colossal strength of the four great piers from which spring the arches of the central cupola, immense in their solidity, yet hardly so clumsy as you think at first when you gaze from under them at the more graceful pillars of the outer arcade.

Of details that repay attention, the chief door into the mosque, typically eastern, stands out. The six minarets, seen from far, are the most graceful of all in the city. Ahmed in building six encroached on the unique dignity of Mecca. The sherif protested, and the Sultan added a seventh to the sacred shrine. His own mosque remains the only one with six.

Within, the later history of the Turks invests the scene with a new interest. It was from the splendid marble pulpit that the fetva decreeing the abolition of the Janissaries was read, while Mahmûd stood in his box. It was round the mosque that much of the fiercest fighting took place that day. Bodies were heaped up before the gate of the court, and from the great sycamore, still standing, and called "the tree of groans," hung corpses "like the black fruit of a tree in hell."

These three are the most splendid of the mosques. Next to them ranks the mosque of Bayezid II. It was built between 1489 and 1497, and the architect was the son of Christodoulos, who built the mosque named after the Conqueror, Bayezid's father. The two sons designed to surpass their father. It cannot be said that they succeeded. The mosque itself has little interest. The fountain in the court does not equal those of Ahmed and Suleiman. But the place will always be visited for the name, which the travellers give it, of the Pigeons' Mosque. A poor widow, says the legend, offered a pair of pigeons to Bayezid for the mosque. These hundreds are their offspring, and they have always been held sacred. They fly about, settle everywhere on the roofs, walk over the floor, and surround in an instant everyone who takes up a handful of grain. They divide the honours of the court with the sellers of trivial ornaments, and the professional letter-writers, whom one may spend a merry half hour in watching, as they formally express the feelings which the lover, or the applicant for a post under government, is rightly supposed to possess, and is anxious to have set forth for him.

The mosque of Bayezid owes something of its attraction to its position, looking on two sides upon a wide open space, with the wall and gate of the Seraskierat only a few yards away. To the east is the great garden, which contains the türbeh of Bayezid himself, with a catafalque thirteen feet long.

Of the hundreds of mosques, each with its own characteristic design or adornment or history, stand out for a word of admiration, those of the Shahzadeh, of Selim I., of the Yeni Valideh, and that called the Tulip Mosque.

The mosque of the Shahzadeh, built like that of Suleiman, by the Moslem architect Sinan, was erected by the Sultan and Roxelana, between 1543 and 1547, to commemorate their eldest son, whose türbeh stands beside it, decorated with the most exquisite Persian tiles. The mosque is on the great central street that runs through Stambûl. Four semi-domes culminate in a great central dome, and four great octagonal pillars support it. It is one of the most beautiful of the Ottoman mosques. It may be added that the mosque which the sorrowing parents built to their youngest son Djanghir (see above p. [170]), at Galata, above Top-haneh, was burnt in 1764, and as it now stands is the result of "restoration" by the present Sultan. It is the most prominent object on the shore as one draws near to landing at the Galata bridge.