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By Root 976 0

the church, and particularly in the main body, are covered with marble panels of great splendor. They have been cleaned and polished; similar, earlier ones in Hagia Sophia await restoration and are dingy by comparison. The Byzantine masons would select blocks of stone of striking color and markings, preferring ones with wavy lines across them. They would cut the blocks vertically into very thin slices and then open them like the pages of a book. The right-hand slab would then present a mirror image in perfect symmetry with the left. If the block was smooth enough, the masons could sometimes cut two or even four pairs of slabs, and the pattern ripples in waves across a wide expanse of wall, thus bringing discipline and order to the irregularity of geology. Samuel Pepys, in Restoration London, described how marble was cut, by means of a technique that had not changed since classical times. A groove was chiseled along the top of a block of stone and filled with sand. Two men then cut into it using a cord as though it were a two-handed toothless saw, grinding away the stone with the sand. About two inches of marble a day can be cut this way. Thousands of days’ work must have gone into cutting the marble panels at the Church of the Savior.

The Savior in Chora is now a beautifully preserved museum surrounded by pretty wooden houses in a working-class district of old Istanbul. The dilapidated walls of Theodosius are nearby, along with a few other fragments of the city’s remote Byzantine past. It is almost miraculous that the church has survived so well and that the 650-year-old mosaics and frescoes of an unknown Byzantine master have outlived the centuries. Other, more magnificent churches have vanished, but the Church of the Savior remains, in perfect serenity, and, thanks to Çelik Gülersoy, its pleasant and picturesque surroundings have been saved too.

How to Explore Istanbul’s Great Mosques

JOHN K. McDONALD

HERE’S ANOTHER of my favorite pieces, again by John K. McDonald (whose article on Istanbul’s caravan stops appeared earlier in this section). I feel this is an excellent introduction to Istanbul’s imperial mosques, and it’s also filled with enough detail to satisfy repeat visitors.

EVERY GREAT city possesses a distinctive architecture, as recognizable as a person’s handwriting. New York has its glass and steel skyscrapers, Paris its slate mansard roofs and chimney pots. Istanbul, with its ten imperial mosques, is no exception. The great brooding monuments, flanked by pencil-thin minarets, punctuate the skyline and emphatically proclaim to any Western visitor that he has taken an enormous stride beyond the familiar and comfortable. The imperial mosques were constructed by the Sultans for themselves and their immediate families between the Ottoman conquest in 1453 and the mid-eighteenth century. They are not necessarily the most beautiful or pleasing. Frequently, the smaller mosques achieve greatness because of the constraints of money and space that the architects had to observe. But the imperial mosques are without question the largest and grandest; situated as they are on the hills of the city, they are visible for miles around.

All share certain formal characteristics: a porticoed courtyard on the west, with a shadirvan, or ablution fountain, in the center and the congregational portion of the mosque to the east; in the mosque proper a mihrab, or prayer niche, cut into the eastern wall (approximately the direction of Mecca from Istanbul), with a pulpit to its right and a loge for the Sultan and his family to its left; lastly, minarets at the corners of the building from which muezzins call the faithful to prayer.

The mosque is often the centerpiece of a complex of related structures, including religious and primary schools, hospitals and kitchens. But unlike those of their coreligionists in Damascus or Cairo, the Istanbul mosques have soaring, breathtaking interiors overarched by domes which hang weightless and in defiance of natural law.

The imperial mosque of Sultan Ahmet I, known as the Blue Mosque