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Istanbul skies change with the seasons, the cloudless days and twinkling Bosphorus of summer edged out by the maritime fogs and flinty seas of the darker months.
However, there’s one place in the city where the heavens always glow a rich cerulean: inside the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, popularly known as the Blue Mosque.
Signifying the sky and the infinite cosmos, blue holds deep spiritual meaning in Islamic culture, and it’s the defining hue inside this 17th-century masterpiece of Ottoman architecture.
Step outside and the view is no less spectacular. Its six minarets and 13 domes are one of the defining features of Istanbul’s celebrated skyline, standing proudly on Seraglio Point, the first of the city’s historical seven hills.
A working mosque, holding 90-minute prayers five times a day, it’s also one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, where a constant flow of respectfully attired tourists enters to admire the space between periods of worship.
Yet beneath this serene blue canopy lies a history soaked in blood, fierce rivalry and religious 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 ancient empire the Ottomans had overthrown.
In pursuit of immortality, he would trigger an architectural war with the holiest site in Islam — a dramatic clash that transformed Istanbul’s skyline forever.
Edge of Europe
“When it was built between 1609 and 1616, Istanbul was not a very populated city,” says historian and travel writer Saffet Emre Tonguç. The metropolis then known as Constantinople had served as Ottoman capital since 1453, when the city’s conquest was the final death blow to the Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans came 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 just one part of a religious, charitable and economic complex, or külliye, much of which survives today. Within its walls stood a madrasa to house theology students, a soup kitchen to feed the poor, a hospital, hospice; the shops of the Arasta Bazaar, and the mausoleum of the leader who gave the entire district his name, Sultan Ahmed.
Situated at the at the tip of the Fatih peninsula where the Bosphorus Strait meets the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, the neighborhood now known as Sultanahmet marks the literal edge of Europe — and the historic 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 in this ancient powerhouse city.
This vast square, now populated by chestnut-sellers and criss-crossing tour groups, was once the Hippodrome of Constantinople, where chariots raced, public executions took place, and, in the Nika riots of 532, an estimated 30,000 rebels against the Byzantine emperor were massacred.
Long before the Sultan Ahmed Mosque was built, ground beneath it was occupied by the fourth-century Palace of Daphne, a major wing of the Great Palace of Constantinople. Though the palace is long gone, mosaics recovered from beneath the Arasta Bazaar are displayed in the Great Palace Mosaics Museum inside the mosque complex that’s currently closed for restoration.
Teenage sultan
At its 17th-century peak, the Ottoman Empire stretched across three continents, from the fortified walls of Vienna to the port of Algiers and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca.
Sultan Ahmed I ascended to the throne at the age of just 13, after the death of his father, Mehmed III, and just months after the ruthless execution of his older half-brother Şehzade Mahmud.
Mehmed III was no stranger to the Ottoman tradition of fratricide as a solution to succession crises, having already had executioners dispatch his 19 brothers in a mass strangling inside the walls of Topkapi Palace.
Ahmed I was 19 when construction began on the grand imperial mosque which he hoped would rival the legendary Hagia Sophia — the imposing Byzantine masterpiece sitting just 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 today vie for vertical dominance, in the 17th century, it was all about the dome. From England’s St Paul’s Cathedral to India’s Taj Mahal, sacral architecture was a global competition awash with curvaceous crowns.
The Sultan Ahmed mosque was architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa’s masterpiece, marrying Islamic design with Byzantine elements in this outstanding expression of Ottoman classical architecture.
The most controversial aspect of its design was its six minarets, the slender towers which the mosque’s strong-voiced muezzin would ascend five times a day to issue the call to prayer. Four hundred years later, this religious official still delivers the melodic chants from the minarets, but with the aid of a loudspeaker.
By demanding six minarets instead of the maximum four traditionally favored by Ottoman sultans, Ahmed I’s construction 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 solution? The sultan is said 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 more typical Ottoman designs. There’s a prayer hall topped by a central dome and four semi-domes. An expansive courtyard, complete with ablution fountain, accommodates overflowing crowds at Friday prayers.
The prayer hall’s magnificent interior is decorated with more than 20,000 Iznik tiles, in one of the most stupendous examples of Ottoman tilework anywhere.
“In the past, the Ottoman sultans loved the Chinese porcelain,” says Tonguç, but as importing was an expensive business, a domestic tile industry developed in the northwestern town of Iznik, which in ancient times was Nicaea, the early Christian center from which we get the Nicene Creed.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque pushed production to its limit in this boom time for these complex and colorful tiles, with the industry going into decline in the 17th century and ceasing altogether by the 18th.
Blue is the dominant color in the prayer hall’s tiles and in the hand-painted floral motifs that decorate its walls and ceilings. Some 260 windows, many of which are stained glass, help flood the space with an almost celestial light.
Huge, cascading, multi-tiered chandeliers hang from the ceiling, once lit by oil lamps but now electrified. Ostrich eggs remain suspended in many of the glass bowls, thanks to a commonly held belief that they repelled spiders.
Sultan Ahmed died of typhus at the age of 27, but his mosque left a legacy that has stood strong through 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, author of “Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923.”
For Ahmed I, chastened by the inconclusive Long Turkish War that ended in 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 complex did, of course, provide long-term income 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, aside from 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 young teenager, he made the decision not to order the execution of his three-year-old half-brother. From that point on, Ottoman princes were permanently confined to apartments in Topkapi Palace’s Imperial Harem known as Kafes, which literally translates as “cage.”
This act of clemency by Ahmed I was to have serious repercussions for the Ottoman empire, explains Tonguç.
Previously, young princes were sent out to cities such as Amasya, Bursa or Manisa to serve as regional governors and gain vital experience as rulers, but now they were entirely cut off, cloistered within the palace walls.
They “were afraid to go to the wars, because they lived in an illusioned world that they could not” leave, says Tonguç, “they didn’t get to see what was the real world outside.”
It was to have significant consequences. By the close of the 17th century, the long, slow decline of the Ottoman Empire — fueled in part by those cosseted, inexperienced leaders — had begun. This internal decay would eventually earn the empire the 19th-century label of “the sick man of Europe” before the centuries-old dynasty came to an end in 1922.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, however, still stands strong.
In 2023, it reopened for prayers after a six-year restoration which was the most comprehensive in its century-long history. At the end of last year, Pope Leo toured the Blue Mosque, becoming the third pope to do so.
Sultan Ahmed and the many human branches of his elevated family tree had often short and brutal lives. However the six-minaretted masterpiece built in his name might reach towards the heavens, promising serenity and transcendence, for many centuries to come.
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