Mosques and Market

Today I finally went inside the Blue Mosque, the mosque located across from the Hagia Sophia that has been showing up in a lot of my "view" pictures. 

Built in the first decades of the 17th century, it gets its name from the thousands of blue Iznik tiles that decorate the interior.  It has equally stunning stained glass window, also in blue.  The interior has a light, airy feel, in contrast to many historic houses of worship, both Christian and Muslim.

I also visited the Suleymaniye Mosque, so named because Suleyman the Magnificent commissioned the famous architect Sinan to construct it in 1550.  Both Suleyman and his almost equally famous favorite wife Haseki Hurrem, who is known as Roxelanna in the west, are buried in mausoleums on the grounds.  However, the entire complex is undergoing extensive exterior renovations and I was unfortunately not able to visit the tombs.

After the mosques, I went to the Egyptian or Spice Bazaar.  Located near the Golden Horn waterfront, this L shaped bazaar specializes it Turkish spices, teas and sweets but clothing and jewelry stalls can also be found inside.  It was built in 1660 to generate funds for the neighboring New Mosque's philanthropic activities.

I have mentioned Turkey's Kurdish minority in several of my previous posts.  Violent Kurdish separatist groups, the Kurdistan worker's party or PKK and its offshoots, have been responsible for some of the recent pre-election violence.  Though the PKK is rightly deemed a terrorist organization, it feeds off the decades, and some would say centuries, of repression of Kurdish culture by the Turkish government.  Up until recently, speaking in Kurdish was forbidden and even letters used in Kurdish but not in Turkish, namely X W and Q, were banned from use.  The official policy of the government was to deny that the Kurds were a separate ethnicity.  Kurds were said to simply be "mountain Turks" who forgot their native Turkish tongue. 

Though the current ruling party, the AKP, has been responsible for loosening the restrictions on Kurdish language and culture, there is still a significant  part of the Turkish population that does not want to grant equal cultural rights to the Kurds.  For example, council members in the town of Dogubeyazit were recently given jail sentences for naming a park after a Kurdish poet.  Their sentences were passed in spite of the fact that the poet's seminal work was translated into Turkish and distributed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.  The council members were found to be in violation of a law, passed in the early days of the Republic, which forbids the use of the letter X.  The poet's name was Ehmede Xani.  From my travels around Istanbul, I can tell you that the letter X is no longer a persona non grata here.  I have seen multiple businesses with letter X in their name.  I also noticed an elderly Turkish woman at a cafe with a purse decorated with the standard Latin alphabet, which of course contains the letter X.  She even received compliments on it from the a woman sitting with her.  The Bogubeyazit council members are clearly suffering from the selective application of this basically defunct law, motivated by ethnic predjudice.  The New York Times recently published an excellent article about the cultural gains the Kurds have made in recent years, and how far they have yet to go to experience true equality in Turkey.