When in Istanbul, you understand you’re on the crossroads of many worlds. You hear and style phrases and flavors right here that you’ve got skilled in far-away locations, all linked by the spice route. You see Roman and Greek structure, the partitions of Constantinople, and most fascinating to me, the Byzantine domes that dot the skyline all over the place you look.
I by no means bored with drawing these domes, beginning on my first night within the metropolis, with the elegant Blue Mosque.
In sharp distinction to the silhouette and proportions of the Blue Mosques is the huge, pink-hued AyaSofya (or Hagia Sofia): Stable and chock-a-bloc with vacationers.
These two mosques sit on two sides of a giant public backyard with a fountain and lawns and the evenings listed below are fantastic, with locals bringing their households and becoming a member of vacationers for a night within the park. I sketched right here many instances over my week within the metropolis.
The Blue Mosque and the AyaSofya is likely to be the most-frequented mosques by guests to the town, however there are equally attractive mosques all around the metropolis, some big, some smaller in dimension. All are very welcoming, with most letting you stroll in even at prayer time. (And, all the pieces besides the AyaSofya was free.)
I attempted various my strategy to every one to seize the way it felt to be there.
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Summer time is often the time of 12 months that my posting right here will get erratic: altering schedules at dwelling, summer time instructing and journey with the household turns issues the wrong way up… however even by these requirements, I’ve been abysmal at posting these previous few months. So the following sequence of posts is a rapid-fire sequence in an try and catch up. Should you desire to get your posts collectively as a weekly or bi-weekly digest and never as on a regular basis bits, I recommend you join right here on substack as a substitute of following alongside right here.
