Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/49

 Turks, and the Church of Saint Sophia became a mosque. The architectural beauties of this masterpiece of the builder's art are too well known to need description here, for Hagia, or Saint, Sophia holds a special place among the ecclesiastical edifices of the world.

The Islamic note sounded by the mention of this now Mu- hammadan place of worship serves to recall the fact that the muazzin's cry is raised from the minarets of fully four hun- dred mosques in the city, so that the boast of having a mosque for each day in the year is no idle vaunt in Constantinople, the present center of the Moslem world. Among these Musulman sanctuaries may be named the Mosque of Sulaiman the Mag- nificent, dating from the sixteenth century and handsomely decorated in its interior with porphyry, marble, and mosaics, as well as enriched with rose-windows of stained glass, taken from the Persians. One is sure to have a glimpse also of the Mosque of Sultan Ahmad, built early in the seventeenth cen- tury, an edifice that rivals, with its six minarets, the holy Ka'ba at Mecca.^

Of high antiquity, and one of the sights of the city, is the ancient race-course, the Hippodrome, which on the east lies close to the Mosque of Ahmad, not far from Saint Sophia. The name At-maiddn^ 'horse-course,' which it bears in Turkish today, is merely a rendering of the Greek Hippo-dromos, thus keeping up at least the content of the old tradition, although the present extent of the course is much less than that occupied by the Hippodrome in days of old, and its original surface is now covered twelve feet deep with earth and sand.^ This scene of

1 See Grosvenor, Constantinople, 2. For an account of the Hippodrome in 666-672, 676-684. the time of Sulaiman the Magnificent

2 An excellent description of the and a woodcut of it by Peter Koeck, Hippodrome is given by Grosvenor, about 1630, see Wiegand, Der Hippo- The Hippodrome of Constantinople drom von Konstantinopel zur Zeit and its Existing Monuments, London, Suleimans d. Gr., in Jahrbuch des 1889, which is reproduced in the same kaiserlich deutschen archaeologischen author's Constantinople, 1. 319-353. Instituts, 23. 1-11, Berlin, 1909.

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