Today we decided to go and explore the Camlica mosque, the immense structure built on a hill on the Asian side, dominating that view. It required a ferry to Uskudar and then a metro and then a climb up a hill past a place where we had lunch (kuru fasulye) and up through a large parking lot, through a very limited park on top of the hill, crowded full of families but restricted to a couple of paths as is often the way with Turkish parks, on through streets filled with new or emerging construction and razor wire fences, through another park, freshly planted with pines, very tidy and with beautiful views (we paused here for a bit; the GF napped, I did nothing much), and then the mosque itself, immense. Not the most beautiful mosque in Istanbul by a long way, and very very large, like it was designed by a mall designer. The inside was nicer as it had a huge expanse of carpet with children racing and stained glass windows that looked like something from a Mario game. On the other side was a vast expanse (concrete, natch) with a metal structure like a huge hedgehog and just past that fairly grim roads.
As we waited for our taxi to arrive we went into the museum at the base of the mosque and this was quite interesting, as it displayed, rather well, religious items from Ottoman times, such as coverings of the Kaaba, bits and pieces from the imperial procession to Mecca, and the casing formerly used for the Black Stone, identical, so far as I could see, to the current casing. A scrap of information that I found interesting: until around the 12th century the shroud of the Kaaba could be any colour, then some ruler set a precedent for black and so it has been ever since.
As we waited for our taxi a quarrel erupted on our building’s WhatsApp group which I followed with interest, using Google Translate. It began with someone saying the light needed to be repaired lest someone fall and get a cerebral haemorrhage, someone responding that who ever heard of anyone getting a cerebral haemorrhage, and someone else replying, stiffly, that in fact their father had died of a cerebral haemorrhage. It continued with abusive messages from one of the residents sent privately to the building manager who forwarded them to the group and said if everyone wanted him to resign he would. This was brought to close in style as another owner replied ‘The murderers of Socrates were those who spoke most and knew least’ and that ended the discussion.
Our taxi arrived, we went to Kadikoy for coffee and then a ferry back and done – stopping along the way to buy some baskets to organise clothes in the wardrobe.