Blue Mosque in Broad Daylight
Here’s the same view of Istanbul‘s Blue Mosque (as the previous picture) but in the full light of day.
The wall of windows in the lower right part of the scene are just above the Arasta, the shops built under the mosque. Arasta shops paid rent to the mosque, financing (at least in part) its maintenance. The Arasta continues in the lower left of the scene—that other row of windows.
And all of it, the mosque and the shops, is built where the vast rambling Great Palace of Constantinople’s Byzantine emperors once stood.
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