East or West?

Hello everyone, I am so excited to tell you everything about Istanbul that I'm blogging directly from my phone, as we're on our way to the next destination and my laptop is currently with the rest of our stuff in the luggage trunk.

So I apologise in advance for the indecent aesthetic of this post :D

It's hard to leave Istanbul, and Turkey generally, after spending a good week losing myself between the prayer calls of the muezzin, the smell of the sea, the taste of simit (our Turkish diet depended for the 90% from these inexpensive, but delightful crowns of bread topped with poppy or sunflower seeds) and çay breaks every now and then.

We've been in the European part of the city for most of our time. Our B&B was in the area of Taksim 1, which in my opinion is the ideal if you prefer a cheap place.

We had the possibility of visiting plenty of places, but the one I loved the most was the Sultanahmet Camii, more famously known as the Blue Mosque.

Hey, I've never ever been into a mosque before!

The first thing that captures your attention is the peace and quiet in the minarets. This Mosque has six.

The Sultan Ahmet commissioned the works for this mosque when he was 19 years old. And he had been reigning for five years at the time!

The mosque contained at first a hospital, a madrasah (a higher education institute), an imaret (soup kitchen), a primary school, a bazaar, a private tomb for the members of the royal family, and a muvakkithane, a time house (please correct me if I'm wrong), where astronomers could watch the stars and make studies for calculating religious holidays and prayer times.

Everyone knows that the worldwide-known denomination of Blue Mosque derives from the dominant colour blue of its interiors.

The walls are covered with more than 21000 tiles from Izmik, old Nicaea, all finely decorated with tulips and other doodles but keeping the colour blue as the dominant one.

The flowery decorations represent the Earth during spring and the Gardens of Paradise.

Another attention-catcher stands in the four fil paye, "elephant paws", pillars of a diameter of 5 meters with an essential Coranic quote at the top of each.

But the wonder and the beauty of this place doesn't stand only in its artworks and aesthetics. It's global, collective and intimate at the same time, and it gets straight to your heart as soon as you decide to get into it.

The ablution ritual, in which you have to wash all your more exposed parts before entering this place, the covering of the hair for women, and taking your shoes off at the entry, are all part of this intricate symbolism which make this place one of the most beautiful I have ever seen so far in my life.

Muslim people have been misunderstood and ostracised through the last years, due to media who constantly search the new "demon" to fight against.

But very few people are clever enough to dig deeper into things and try to fully understand the true meaning of this fascinating world.

Pictures will arrive very soon, I promise, but for the moment that's all! 

See you in Tbilisi, Georgia!