From the archives – A trip to Istanbul in 2010
The Dream
It began with a recurring dream. A small, vivid vignette that returned again and again.
I am startled awake by a haunting voice. A strange, melodic chanting in a language I don’t understand. I open my eyes and search the darkness. Where am I?
A hotel room: wood floors, four-poster bed. A dim glow seeps through gauzy curtains drawn across French doors. The chanting continues, muffled and distant, as if carried through stone.
I cross the room, open the doors, and step onto an iron balcony—into another century.
Predawn light hangs over the cobblestone streets below. A man pushes a cart piled with bread. Two figures in black drift silently along the stones. The chanting echoes through narrow canyons of block walls. The air is heavy with sea salt, damp and alive.
Again, where am I?
Then it clicks. The chanting is the Muslim call to prayer. The figures in black wear abaya and scarf. I’m in an ancient city near the sea.
Over the next few months, the same dream returns. I begin to wonder why. Is it a sign? A premonition? An invitation?
I chose to believe it is an invitation. And I accepted.
Istanbul
Istanbul is an international city with a population of nearly 16 million people, of which over 90% are Muslim. A large majority are Sunni. Istanbul straddles the Bosphorus where Europe looks across the water at Asia and Asia looks back. Istanbul is one of the rare cities that doesn’t belong to a single civilization as much as it belongs to a long history of many civilizations. Around 660 BC, the Greeks named it, Byzantium. In 330 CE, The Romans changed it to, Constantinople. In 1453, the Ottoman Empire renamed it, Istanbul.
My home in Istanbul is a privately owned guesthouse in Sultanahmet. Just like in the recurring dream, it has wood floors, a four-poster bed, and tall windows overlooking a cobblestone street. Unfortunately, there’s no balcony. But every morning, at the first hint of dawn, I wake to the Muslim call to prayer.
Sultanahmet is Istanbul’s most historic district, a place that distills centuries into a walkable neighborhood. Sit at an outdoor café and set your Turkish coffee on a table patterned with Byzantine mosaics. Look across the tree-lined plaza that once held the Roman Hippodrome, where chariots thundered in circles. Marvel at the Hagia Sophia—once a Christian cathedral—sharing the same open space with the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, known to the world as the Blue Mosque. Between sips, you’ve taken in sixteen hundred years of history.
In this post, I want to narrow the focus to the Blue Mosque and the challenge of doing justice to it in a single photograph.
The Blue Mosque
The Blue Mosque isn’t a single building. It’s a small city of stone; a cascade of domes and half-domes rising into the sky. From ground level, no photograph can fully convey its presence. From here, you only catch fragments: a minaret slicing into the air, a dome hovering above a courtyard, a curve of leaded roof glowing bluish-gray in the morning light.
The Courtyard
Entering through the front gate feels like crossing into another world. The courtyard welcomes you with calm, a pause from the noise of Istanbul. Both expansive and intimate, it was designed as a place of prayer and passage.
The mosque is so immense that only a portion of the façade fits in this frame. Still, I managed to catch something even rarer—a small moment between a mother and her son at the fountain.
Inside the Blue Mosque
The central dome of the Blue Mosque rises 141 feet above the prayer hall floor. To understand the scale, notice the people standing underneath the circle of lights. These lights hover dozens of feet above the floor. About the same height as a second story window.
Imagine what it’s like standing in this enormous vertical space. Once again, the area is so vast it resists being contained within a single photograph.
The Last Day
It’s my last day in Istanbul, and all I can think about is getting the Blue Mosque into a single frame.
I wake early and circle the structure inside its gravitational pull. The walk through Sultanahmet is beautiful. The streets are quiet, and the light is soft. Still, in my viewfinder, the mosque is only pieces and fragments. A minaret here. A dome there. Never the whole.
Frustrated, I sit beside a marble fountain. It’s so early even the ubiquitous pigeons haven’t arrived. I lean back against the cool stone and close my eyes. My thoughts drift to one important question: where will I get my last Turkish coffee of this trip?
I open my eyes, take a slow breath—and see it.
A building about ten stories tall, topped with a terrace shaded by green canopies. The kind you’d find at a rooftop restaurant. And it sits diagonally across from the Blue Mosque. My mind’s eye draws a straight line from that terrace to the mosque—an unobstructed view.
How do I get up there?
I walk to the front entrance. Through the glass I see a front desk and someone standing behind it. What do I have to lose?
Inside the Building
I push through the door, camera hanging from my neck.
“Can I help you?” he asks immediately.
“On my way to the terrace,” I say, with a hint of urgency.
“The restaurant isn’t open.”
(Yes. I guessed right.)
“I’m here to take photos while it’s closed,” I reply without missing a beat, one hand on the camera.
He stares. Then looks me up and down.
One second. Two seconds. Three.
Without breaking eye contact, he jerks his head toward what I hope is the elevator. I nod and move quickly, resisting the urge to look back.
The elevator doors open directly across from the kitchen.
Two guys in white aprons look up at me like I’m a raccoon that learned to use buttons.
“Can I help you?”
The place is empty. The only lights on are in the kitchen. Beyond them, the terrace glows with soft morning light.
I glance toward the terrace and then back to them. “Actually… I was hoping you’d let me take just one photo from your terrace of the Blue Mosque. One photo and I’ll be gone. That’s it.”
Kitchen staff are impossible to bluff. Their instincts are razor sharp, honed on tourists, critics, charmers, and every variety of human behavior.
On this top floor, honesty is my only chance.
He looks at the terrace. I follow his eyes. He looks at my camera. I look at him.
“Sure,” he says. “Go ahead.”
And he turns back to the kitchen, his mind already on something else.
The Shot
Outside on the terrace, I walk slowly toward the edge. With each deliberate step, the Blue Mosque reveals more of itself; domes stacking on domes, minarets rising into the sky.
The sunlight is veiled by a thin layer of cloud. A soft breeze carries the faint scent of roasted nuts and the sea. Below, a barely audible hum rises from the cobblestones as Istanbul wakes.
I lift the camera and bring my eye to the viewfinder.
There it is, filling the frame in full grandeur.
The Blue Mosque of Istanbul.
It remains one of my favorite travel photos of all time.
From domes and stained glass,
prayers ascend to the heavens.
There shines one light for all.
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