Istanbul, The Blue Mosque

The famous Süleyman Mosque (Sultan Ahmed), is best known as the Blue Mosque, for the blue tile in the interior. Before we entered, we had to take off our shoes and leave them on a shelf at the entrance, with hundreds of others. We wondered if everyone always takes the same shoes when they leave. This Mosque is huge, and the floor is covered by hundreds of small rugs, Turkish rugs, it is safe to say. There are several domes (counting the little ones, there are perhaps a couple of dozen), and tall, slender minarets. We could have spent days just to see a summary of the place, but if we spend more than 30 minutes today, we will miss too many other important things, including our ship when it sails at noon.

There is one more bit of blue in the Blue Mosque, information not discussed in other tourist books, a scoop for this Photo-Tidbit. In Athens I bought two sun-visors, and one was lost in this Mosque. Why is that important? Well, it was a blue sun-visor. When we got back to the ship, we were told that one of the tour leaders found a blue sun-visor, and had tried to find its owner, but I guess we had already left.