The Gül Camii and Aya Nikola

Istanbul has no shortage of cool old churches and mosques, and it can often feel like too much of a good thing. “You know”, Jürgen or I will remark on a increasingly frequent basis, “I think we’ve visited enough mosques”. And we’ll briefly consider changing the day’s plans. But what are we going to do? Just ignore something as cool as the Rose Mosque?

When entering an extremely old mosque, we’ve learned to look for the placement of the mihrab: the semicircular niche which indicates the directi...