We spent the day as tourists of course. The whole group of us (2 professors and 10 students) visited the Blue Mosque, the Hippodrome and Hagia Sophia this morning. Lily, Julia and I actually discovered that if we stood on the chairs on the terrace at the top of our building we can see the Blue Mosque. This was the mosque we tried to visit yesterday. It’s absolutely gorgeous inside; it is known as the Blue Mosque for the blue tiles that adorn the interior. When approaching the mosque, the many domes appear to ripple upwards.
The Hippodrome was the place of horse/chariot racing. The actual racing ring is now used as a street. The center was turned into a city park. Two obelisks are located within, one of which is actually Egyptian and brought to the site by Emperor Theodosius. The spiral bronze sculpture is actually part of a three-headed serpent piece; it is what’s left of the Greek’s Tripod of Plataea, which celebrated the Greek victory over the Persians in the Persian War.
Hagia Sophia was what I was most interested in seeing. I was only disappointed in the fact that there was scaffolding in the center which prevented a full view of the central dome. Hagia Sophia was an early Byzantine church, but was turned into a mosque in 1453. It is now a museum and you can find elements of both the church and the mosque. The amount of detail in the mosaics left from the Byzantine church was amazing. Many of the mosaics were covered up by plaster during a period of iconoclasm. In turning it into a mosque all the crosses had be removed from the walls (some have left impressions in the marble).
After taking a siesta in the afternoon, we went to the Grand Bazaar. Bargaining for goods seems to be a real art. Many of the shopkeepers kept calling us the Spice Girls, not sure how I should take that.
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