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  • The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Turkish: Sultanahmet Camii) is a mosque in Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey and the capital of the Ottoman Empire (from 1453 to 1923). The mosque is famously known as the Blue Mosque for the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior The mosque was built between 1609 and 1616 by order of the Sultan Ahmed I, after whom it is named. He is buried in the mosque's precincts. It is located in the oldest part of Istanbul, in what was before 1453 the centre of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It is next to the site of the ancient Hippodrome, and a short distance from what used to be the Christian Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) which has now been converted into a museum. The mosque was deliberately sited to face Hagia Sophia. However, the architect was unable to construct a bigger dome than Hagia Sophia's, so he instead made the mosque splendid by the perfect proportion of domes, semidomes, and minarets. Still, the building failed to surpass Hagia Sophia in size, which greatly angered Sultan Ahmet. The two buildings thus comprise a unique historical and architectural precinct. The last structure on the kiblah side is an arasta - a row of shops of the same trade. A section of the arasta was destroyed by fire in 1912, but the remaining part contains the mosaic museum and a souvenir shop. The mosque became known in the west as the Blue Mosque because of the predominantly blue coloring of paintwork of the interior. However this blue paint was not part of the mosque's original decor so it is being removed. Today the interior of the mosque does not strike the visitor as being particularly blue. The architect of the Sultan Ahmed, Sedefhar Mehmet Aga, was given a mandate to spare no expense.

  • said segite

  • 2007.04.05 at 16:42:33 PDT

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