PHOTOS FROM TURKEY DAY TWO (part 1)

Day two of our trip was extremely busy. Because of this I'll be doing several entries for just this day. We started off the day with a visit to the Blue Masque, so called because of its exquisite tile decoration. It is the only mosque in Istanbul to have six minarets. I would have taken more pictures of it from the outside had it not been raining that day. Before entering we had to remove our shoes. From the Blue Mosque we walked over to the Hagias Sophia which was built in 537 A.D. For over nine centuries it was the center of the Easatern Orthodox Church, was turned into a mosque with the Ottoman conquiest of Istanbul and now is a museum. It contains some of the finest mosaics to have survived from the Byzantine period. And how did they survive? They were covered up with plaster when the church became a mosque since there were no representations of people allowed inside. It was strange that the crosses were allowed to remain though. Once the mosque became a museum, then the plaster was then removed that covered the mosaics. The dome in this building is massive. Our guide told us that it is about 18 stories tall. As you can tell by the photos there was some renovations going on at the time.

Larry Hewett