Imagine Istanbul

Near the edge of the water where the Golden Horn meets the Bosphorus, in Eminönü, Istanbul stands the New Mosque or the Yeni Camii. If you stand on the Galata Bridge, you can see this lovely mosque - it is not the big one to the right of the skyline behind which the sun sets called the Süleymaniye Camii, but the smaller sandy colored one by the shore. It is not literally a “new” mosque for its construction was actually started in 1597, and not completed until 1663. In this photograph, you may not immediately recognize the New Mosque, but it is a detail of the domed roof of the mosque.

It was here that I first found the little boy of Istanbul, polishing shoes for his daily living. When I returned to Istanbul six months later, I searched all around the area of the New Mosque and the Egyptian Market, looking for him to give him the photographs I had taken of him. He was nowhere to be found in this area again. Until the third day when I found him.

At the end of our day together, we went back to the New Mosque and I took another photograph of him there. He looks so sad in this photograph in his new clothes. He knew why I wanted to take a photograph of him here, because this was where our lives had crossed paths, and I am sure he had enjoyed the day together with me, the foreign girl with blond hair and blue eyes. Maybe the day together had been so unlike any of the other days of his short, difficult life and he knew that the day was quickly coming to a close. I don’t know. We didn’t share a common language, it had been communication with gestures, smiles and eyes. But to understand the deeper meaning between people, you need a common language or something as simple as a translator.

Two Queen mothers and three architects were involved in the construction of the New Mosque. The mother of Sultan Mehmet III, Valide Sultan Safiye, initiated the building but the construction encountered problems such as funding, , corruption, water seepage and the death of a Sultan. Another mother of a Sultan, Valide Sultan Turhan Hattice, had the building completed in 1663. The architects involved in the design were originally Davut Agha, later the architect Dalgıç Ahmed Agha and finally the architect Mustafa Agha.

Outside the New Mosque, you will find the Egyptian Market and poor people selling bird seeds or waiting for you to step on a scale to check your weight for a price. The bustling crowd, the pigeons, the people in transit hurrying to and fro in their daily lives but. inside the mosque it is peaceful, there were women sitting inside. I took some photographs quietly; I didn’t want to bother anyone.

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