It was a working day for me, though not for the GF, but when he said he was planning a tour of the mosques of Fatih, I of course joined him. So we took the metro to near the Istanbul University with its startling metro station, and went first to the Kalendarhane mosque. This is a former Byzantine church, though almost nothing remains other than the shape, and the name is a reference to Sufi status, though it was far more austere than anything you find at any site dedicated to Shahbaz Qalandar in Pakistan. I wonder how much folk religion was lost with the Turkish republic, at least in its heart in Istanbul. Outside the mosque was a very pretty garden, inaccessble and fully overgrown, with crumbling red walls peeping out from greenery. The streets were generally quiet and pretty.
The next was the Şehzade mosque, my favourite. Lovely, peaceful gardens in beautiful early winter sunlight, and hte mosque itself was cool and expansive but accessible, one could imagine reading a book here. Beautiful painting. Just outside, around the corner, we came across an unexpected point of interest, a green marble pillar set by Sinan and marking the centre of Istanbul.
The next mosque, Kilise Cami (church mosque – another converted church) was closed for restoration. The way between here and the Sulemaniye mosque was through a neighbourhood that seemed devastated by fire, by earthquakes, by gentrification. There were hollowed buildings on either side, some blackened and crumbling, and mountains of rubble. A group of very small children played barefoot on the gravel road, their toy the magnetic tape from a video cassette, the first I have seen since the mid-1990s. Underfoot, amidst the gravel, were ribs from some animal, picked clean of flesh. Then rubbled started to be hidden behind scaffolding, and eventually a row of gleaming new row houses appeared, uninhabited still, and built in a nostalgic style, rising up the hill towards Sulemaniye. There was something truly obscene about it.
Sulemaniye masjid was spectacular, awe-inspiring, a true imperial mosque. It was monumental, and one could easily imagine the moment described on one of the plaques, when Sinan opened the doors for prayer. Fortunate that our visit was in pandemic times as there were no more than about a dozen people there, including two Russian women taking photos of each other holding up gauzy scarves to billow in the breeze.
I was also very impressed by the lighting, I must say. Those immense discs of lights suspended from tens of metres in the air to hang just overhead.
We went for coffee via the Spice Bazaar – again, my first time there, and again it was mostly empty. The coffee was very good – a place the GF and I had tried to go to a few times in the past and been thwarted — and afterwards I got some almond paste, something I associate with my mother even though I can’t remember if it’s because she liked it, or because she was mystified that I liked it.
It is a day when my mind is always elsewhere. It’s been six years today since my mother died, and it still feels implausible that she’s dead.