Grammar and Architecture

"Your Turkish is good -- you speak very fluently," said the man selling interesting, if somewhat garish, jewelry. "But I think you need some new Turkish words."

Yes, yes I do. I refrained from commenting that while his vocabulary was adequate, his diction was somewhat lacking.

My classes are consuming. On Friday, I was chastised for, well to be honest, I am not really sure what -- the explanation of my error was in rapid Turkish and utilized a lot of specialized grammar vocabulary (embedded clause, nominalization, etc.). After four attempts at filling the blank with the correct suffix my menacing grammar instructor gave up and proceeded to ask what was wrong with me in English. Never mind that the correct answer (the ablative suffix) transformed the main verb of the sentence into a noun, thus leaving the sentence without a predicate.

I am really scared of this women.

But enough grammar. This weekend the program hosted a tour of some historic sites around Istanbul. By "sites" I mostly mean mosques (cami in Turkish). Cami cami cami... our adventures in Ottoman architecture began at the Suleymaniye Mosque, pictured immediately below. Like the (Byzantine) Hagia Sophia, Suleymaniye has a main dome flanked by two semi domes. On account of this similarity, some "orientalist scholars" have argued that Ottoman architecture was really neo-Byzantine architecture. That is to say, the Ottomans have no architectural style of their own.

As you can imagine, many Turks take issue with this.

Suleymaniye

Our tour was a day long refutation of this argument, supported by two more mosques (Sehzade and and Fatih Sultan Mehmet, also pictured below) and several Byzantine churches, all of which demonstrated what our guide considered a distinctly Ottoman style -- mathematically precise symmetry, corner towers, a main hemisphere surrounded by four partial hemispheres. These elements are also included in buildings such as the Taj Mahal and several famous Russian churches, the names of which I don't remember.

Sehzade

Fatih Sultan Mehmet

Byzantine Church Mosaics

It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to convey the presence of these buildings in pictures. A more complete collection is available in my flickr account.

The tour, which was scheduled to end at three, concluded at six o'clock. The final site we visited was in a very conservative neighborhood. In Fatih, girls as young as 7 were covering their hair and almost all of the women past their teens were completely covered, their black robes hiding everything but their eyes. Despite my modest dress, I have never felt more like an obnoxious American tourist.