Sultan Ahmet Mosque

Ariel View. Image: Beautifulmosque.com

More than 95 percent of people follow Isalm in Turkey. Istanbul is no different. The magnificent Sultan Ahmet Mosque (Blue Mosque) marks Istanbul as the center of Islam. It has six minarets which represents its glory and its importance. One of the travel guides explained us the importance of the minarets. The minaret functions as a high place from where the announcements for "call for prayers" can be made. Most of the mosques here have dome which can easily resist against the seaward breeze.  The mosque with one or two minaret are ordinary mosque often build by general people. The one with four are build by the sultans or other royalties. And the mosque with six minarets, the grand one, represents its location as the center of the Islamic world are also built by "important people".

This mosque is called the Blue Mosque by the foreigners because of its interior of blue tiles. Image: Wikipedia

There is a legend about the construction of six minarets in Blue Mosque. Sultan Ahmet I ordered his architect to build a grand mosque with a golden minaret. In my opinion, he wanted to overshadow the grande of the Roman architecture, St. Sophia (Hagia Sophia) by building a grand mosque beside the famous Church( later turned into a Mosque, now a museum). "Altum" means gold in Turkish which was misheard by the architect as "Alti" which means six. So there he went, without asking the Sultan to repeat, doing whatever he heard in that big royal crowd. Was asking the Sultan a question back in the days an offence? Apparently, the Sultan did not see this huge mosque being built right in front of his royal palace, the Topkapi Palace until it was competed. It turned out that the sultan loved it and the architect, who must have later found out that he meant "Altim", had his breathe of relief (cause apparently it does not take sultan much to execute someone)

Sultan Ahmet Mosque at night

As far as I know, only two other mosques have more minarets than Sultan Ahmet; Al-Masjid al- Haram, the holiest mosque in Mecca has nine minarets and Al-Masjid al-Nawabi, the location of the holy prophet's tomb in Medina has ten. So, even if the travel guide was making up the story, I would without doubt accept Istanbul as the center of Islamic world developed by the Ottomans, who are by far my favorite empire.

The beautiful garden/park at Sultan Ahmet Square