Call to Prayer

Istanbul is blanketed in mosques. Throughout the city, you are never more than a few blocks away from one. Yet the undisputed icons of the city and the spiritual (and tourist) heart of the city are two massive mosques that face each other, separated by a beautiful park. As the story goes, they were built by competing sultans trying to outspend each other on lavish glories to god. Called the Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, these buildings are truly monuments to man’s ability to create beauty.

(Ritual of men washing feet before prayer)

(Inside the Blue Mosque...all covered up out of respect for their beliefs.)

Turkey is 99% Muslim, and five times a day the city's mosques blast the call to prayer from their loudspeakers. The first comes at a shockingly early 5am, nearly knocking my sister out of bed on the first night. You can hear the call in every corner of the city, and it is a hauntingly beautiful cry. After the first morning, we talked about the call to prayer and how much it just gave us all the goose bumps at the beauty of it. Perhaps more than anything else, the call to prayer made us feel as though we were definitely not in the "West," but had entered the vaguely defined "East.”

(Ayasofia Mosque)

(Inside Ayasofia. Here you have to try to move your thumb all the way around the circle without lifting your thumb at anytime. If you do this your wish will come true...or something superstitious like that.)

Although there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of mosques in Istanbul, we only made it to a few. But we did hear the call to prayer everyday, five times a day, and were still found in awe each time.