Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City Read Online Free PDF

so. Today there is virtually nothing left in Eminönü to remind us of the colourful Latin period in the city’s history, other than a few medieval Venetian basements underlying some of the old hans in the market quarter around Rüstem Pa ş a Camii.
    The area directly in front of the Galata Bridge, where Yeni Cami now stands, was in earlier centuries a Jewish quarter, wedged in between the concessions of the Venetians and the Amalfians. The Jews who resided here were members of the schismatic Karaite sect, who broke off from the main body of Orthodox Jewry in the eighth century. The Karaites seem to have established themselves on this site as early as the tenth century, at about the time when the Italians first obtained their concessions here. The Karaites outlasted the Italians though, for they retained their quarter up until the year 1660, at which time they were evicted to make room for the final construction of Yeni Cami. They were then resettled in the village of Hasköy some three kilometres up the Golden Horn and on its opposite shore, where their descendants remain to this day.
    YEN İ CAM İ
    The whole area around the Stamboul end of the Galata Bridge is dominated by the imposing mass of Yeni Cami, the New Mosque, more correctly called the New Mosque of the Valide Sultan. The city is not showing off its great age in calling new a mosque built in the seventeenth century: it is just that the present mosque is a reconstruction of an earlier mosque of the same name. The first mosque was commissioned in 1597 by the Valide Sultan (Queen Mother) Safiye, the mother of Sultan Mehmet III. The original architect was Davut A ğ a, a pupil of the great Sinan, the architect who built most of the finest mosques in the city during the golden age of Süleyman the Magnificent and his immediate successors. Davut A ğ a died in 1599, however, and was replaced by Dalg ı ç Ahmet Çavu ş , who supervised the construction up until the year 1603. But in that year Mehmet III died and his mother Safiye was unable to finish her mosque. For more than half-a-century the partially completed mosque stood on the shore of the Golden Horn, gradually falling into ruins. Then in 1660 the whole area was devastated by fire, further adding to the ruination of the mosque. Later in that year the ruined and fire-blackened mosque caught the eye of the Valide Sultan Turhan Hadice, mother of Mehmet IV, who decided to rebuild it as an act of piety. The architect Mustafa A ğ a was placed in charge of the reconstruction, which was completed in 1663. On 6 November of that year the New Mosque of the Valide Sultan was consecrated in a public ceremony presided over by the Sultan and his mother. The French scholar Grelot, writing when Turhan Hadice was still alive, tells us that she was one of the “greatest and most brilliant ( spirituelle ) ladies who ever entered the Saray,” and that it was fitting that “she should leave to posterity a jewel of Ottoman architecture to serve as an eternal monument to her generous enterprises.”
    But time has dimmed the glitter of Safiye’s jewel, and its walls and windows are blackened by the soot from the ferries which berth nearby. Then, too, Yeni Cami was built after Ottoman architecture had passed its peak, and it fails to achieve the surpassing beauty of Sinan’s masterpieces of the previous century. Nevertheless, it is still a fine and impressive structure, and its graceful silhouette is an adornment to the skyline of Stamboul.
    Yeni Cami, like many of the other imperial mosques in Stamboul, represents a variation on the basic plan of the great church of Haghia Sophia. Whereas in Haghia Sophia the central dome is flanked by two semidomes along the longitudinal axis, Yeni Cami is cruciform, with semidomes along both axes and smaller domes at each of the four corners. The resultant silhouette is a graceful flowing curve from dome to semidomes to minor domes, a symmetrical cascade of clustering spheres. The north and