Tuesday 12 May 2026 – Once again, Mostafa picked us up at our usual spot round the corner and down the hill from the hotel. I grabbed the front seat in the bus in the hope to get some shots out of the windscreen as we went along, and I was delighted when he headed off to downtown Istanbul through the Aqueduct of Valens, which I’ve written about earlier, but which we hadn’t really got a decent photo of. So Jane grabbed a shot out of the side window, which gives a great idea of the scale of the thing,

and I grabbed a shot as we went towards it.

It’s a magnificent construction, originally bringing water to the city from over 250km away.

The object of our first visit was also a magnificent construction – the Süleymaniye Mosque, one of the large, Imperial mosques which dominate the skyline of the city. The mosque was commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the imperial architect Mimar Sinan, who was the chief Ottoman architect, engineer and mathematician for sultans Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II and Murad III.

We had a short walk towards the mosque, and passed dwellings with some very attractive balconies, typical of that part of the city.

Suleiman was the longest-reigning sultan, being in charge from 1520 – 1566. His rule brought about a notable peak in the Ottoman Empire’s economic, military and political power, and raised the number of the empire’s subjects to at least 25 million people, mainly by acquisition – Belgrade, Rhodes, bits of the Hungarian Empire, Iraq and Tripoli, though he was apparently fought to a standstill at Vienna. He was clearly a remarkable man and a strong ruler, and he didn’t bugger about when commissioning the mosque that bears his name. The largest Ottoman-era mosque in the city, it’s one of the best-known sights of Istanbul and is considered a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture and one of Mimar Sinan’s greatest works.

It’s on the city’s third hill (Istanbul followed the examples of Rome and Sheffield by being built on seven hills) and has commanding views over the Golden Horn.

You can see the kitchen chimneys in the foreground that show the mosque is, unsurprisingly, the centre of a külliye. Before we went in to the mosque, Seçkin showed us the cemetery outside.

Some of the gravestones have hats, and some don’t – respectively the men’s and women’s. I could feel Jane’s “harrumph” from several metres away, where I was photographing the reason for the profusion of gravestones there;

Suleiman’s tomb. He is buried in there, and people were anxious to be buried as close as possible to the great man, hence the crowding. Outside the entrance are the ablution stations where ritual ablutions are performed which are part of the devotional process of worship in Islam

and the entrance takes you through to a large courtyard.

The interior is, unsurprisingly, a large space. Photographically, I have to say, I found it a bit of an anticlimax. This is entirely unreasonable of me – it’s intended as a space for worship, not photography; but I couldn’t help but compare it to other (effectively) imperial mosques I have been to elsewhere – Oman and, particularly, Abu Dhabi. In its defence, this mosque predates both of those mosques – and photography itself – by some centuries, so my expectations were maybe a bit high.

But it was difficult to photograph the interior – there were too many things in the way all the time. So I have photos of bits of the interior, including some fetching stained glass, but no stills that convey the size and atmosphere of the place.

I spotted a cat making its way around, and so this will go into our “cats of Istanbul” collection.

There was also this going on.

This was a singing, or chanting, competition. Candidates were being assessed on the elegance of their diction and accuracy of their singing as they went through nine Qu’ranic chants.

This gave a very atmospheric background to a video I took in an attempt to convey the size and grandeur of the interior.

It also gave rise to a lovely comedy moment as Jim tried to explain stuff about the mosque to our group.

 

After our visit to this grand mosque, our next stop was a visit to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, which is a short walk away, and is approached through streets which get ever more crowded with stalls as you approach; I suppose the stallholders are vying to get business by being close to the Grand Bazaar itself.

The Bazaar is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, with 61 covered streets and over 4,000 shops in a total area of 30,700m².  It’s often regarded as one of the first shopping malls of the world and gets hundreds of thousands of visitors every day. One thing that Seçkin was keen to point out is that although many, many tourists visit it, it’s emphatically not a tourist trap – it’s a huge retail space and the locals go their to do their shopping as well as tourists.

Here’s how huge and complicated it is. It’s not a ragtag assembly of market stalls; it’s a large, roofed-over space

consisting of several streets.

It’s quite an extraordinary thing, with over 20 entrances.  We went in through one, which had the obligatory and peremptory security scanner

and navigated as a group through various of the streets. We had to stick together, as it would have been utter chaos had we got split up. Some of the streets are quite wide,

some less so

and some are, well, a little cramped.

The variety of goods on offer is bewildering.

The Grand Bazaar was at one stage surrounded by hans, workshops or caravanserais, where merchants congregated and worked on goods to be sold in the bazaar. Seçkin took us to one small one, Zincirli Han, where there are still some active workshops.

We exited the Bazaar and Seçkin led us towards lunch via another Han, the Büyük Valide Han, or Queen Mother’s Han.

It wasn’t frankly, much to look at.

Its significance is, I think, mainly historical, since it was once inhabited by rich Iranian merchants, but it’s somewhat dilapidated now. Our next stop was lunch, which was at a restaurant called Hamdi, which was posh, and gave us a great view over the Golden Horn

but, although the food was delicious and the service expert, the portions were stingy compared to the lavish generosity of all the other restaurants we visited during our week here.

Lunch over, it was time to visit another mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque. Named after Rüstem Pasha, who served as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Suleiman I, it was, like the Suleimaniye Mosque, designed by the Ottoman imperial architect Mimar Sinan and completed in around 1563. It’s not a large mosque, but its interior is striking. Again, it’s difficult to capture it in stills

so perhaps a video might give a better idea.

Virtually every surface is covered in beautiful Iznik tiles. I have lots of photos of different patterns, but this is a good example of the colour and intricacy of the designs.

Our final port of call for the day was probably Istanbul’s most famous building and certainly one of its largest – the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque. Its bulk and significance means that it promises to be the highlight of any visit to the city. The current structure was the third church to be erected on the site, completed in AD 537, immediately becoming the world’s largest interior space. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have changed the history of architecture. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it became a mosque, having its minarets added soon after. The site became a museum in 1935, and was redesignated as a mosque in 2020. As I said, it promises to be the highlight of any visit to Istanbul.

Sadly, it fails to deliver on that promise at the moment.  We had seen from a distance that it was covered in scaffolding, and our guides had told us that we would only be able to visit the galleries, not the main space. It would have been good had our preparatory material for the tour explained that to set our expectations. It’s very obviously the subject of a major renovation project

and the interior is all full of scaffolding, which is why only the galleries are publicly accessible (although there were a few people wandering around in the main space, which puzzles us).

The scaffolding and protective sheeting over the main part of the building means that only glimpses are possible of the interior.

For those dedicated to seeking out specific items, there are a few mosaics to be seen.

and there’s considerable evidence of what an awe-inspiring place it must have been in its prime.

For a dedicated scholar, it’s probably still a rewarding place to visit. For a generalist photographer like myself, frankly, not so much.  It’ll be lovely when it’s finished.

Outside, on a hoarding, is an image of what it is supposed to look like.

I doubt the restoration/renovation will be completed in my lifetime, sadly.

This was a somewhat downbeat end to the day. We had, of course, seen some very impressive and beautiful sights; and the morrow – our final day of trooping around looking at things – promised more.