Anset2000 Blog

Shot a few photos at Sultan Ahmed Mosque.  It is not the Taj Mahal, but it is still a wonderful sight. From Wikipedia:  It was built from 1609 to 1616, during the rule of  Ahmed I . Like many other mosques, it also comprises a tomb of the founder, a  madrasah  and a hospice. While still used as a mosque, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque has also become a popular tourist attraction. The design of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque is the culmination of two centuries of both Ottoman  mosque and  Byzantine  church development. It incorporates some Byzantine elements of the neighboring  Hagia Sophia  with traditional Islamic architecture and is considered to be the last great mosque of the  classical period . The architect has ably synthesized the ideas of his master  Sinan , aiming for overwhelming size, majesty and splendour. It has 6 minarets along with 8 domes and 1 main one.

Here are a few photos of Hagia Sophia , Istanbul, Turkey. Federico Zeri , the Italian art historian, wrote several times that the  Basilica of San Marco in Venice  in his opinion is the copy of St. Sophia in Istanbul. In the Middles Ages the meaning of "copying" a building was to copy and replicate its map to the ground, not necessarily its walls and roofs. Zeri wrote that the  width, length and other measures of the San Marco Basilica in Venice are the same "at the centimetre" as those of St. Sophia in Constantinople, now Istanbul. Venice was for centuries the Byzantium (then Constantinople, then Istanbul) of the West. Although located in Catholic Italy it thrived with commerce with the East and was culturally, economically and also artistically linked and with Byzantium and with Orthodox Europe and Asia.