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Updated: September 29, 2025
Sophia, which is now a Mohammedan mosque, shall once more be the home of Christian worship. With this plan in mind, Russian diplomats were only too happy to stir up trouble for the Turks among the Slavic peoples of the Balkan states, as Serbia, Bulgaria, Roumania, and Montenegro are called.
Passed one to-day, with Arabic characters carved on the stone raised at its head. Passed by also several desert mosques, which are simply the outline in small stones, of the ground-plan of Mahometan temples. We have, in many instances, only the floor of the mosque marked out, or rather the walls which inclose the floor. Within the outlines the stones are nicely cleared away.
First they built only chapels in the outermost aisles; but in a little while, to make room for a choir, they destroyed six rows of columns; and at last, when Master Martin Luther had rekindled Catholic piety, they set up a great church in the very middle of the mosque.
Sophia the mosque which interested me most was one to which we could not gain admittance a mosque some distance up the Golden Horn, where the sultan is crowned and where the friend of Mohammed and mother of a former sultan are buried. It is considered so very sacred that Christian feet are not allowed to enter even the outer court.
His wisdom is a light on the wall, in which burns a lamp covered with glass. The glass shines like a star, the lamp is lit with the oil of a blessed tree. No Eastern, no Western oil, it shines for whoever wills." After the prayers were over, and we had descended to the floor of the mosque, I spent the rest of my time under the dome, fascinated by its marvellous lightness and beauty.
A brown bodyguard of native children, mainly clad in silver chains and medals, escorts the strangers with intense delight to a shabby little mosque, where a Dervish, in the orange turban rewarding a pilgrim to Mecca, beats a big drum in the stone court.
Stambul is the Turkish quarter. It consists of a sea of closely-built wooden houses of many colours. Just below your feet is the great bazaar the merchants' town; and farther off is St. Sophia, the principal mosque. Like Rome, the city is built on seven hills. In the valleys between, shady trees and gardens have found a site. Far to the west are seen the towers on the old wall of Stambul.
We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old mansion which possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had become orientalized so much so that he had a zenana. But he was a broadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque; to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will arrive, somewhere.
For God Himself had been made imperfect by the impeding of His moral purpose. But the Messiah had pronounced the Tetragrammaton, and God and the Creation were One again. O mystic transport! O ecstatic reunion! The joyous shouts died into a more beatific silence. From some near mosque there broke upon the midnight air the solemn voice of the muëddin chanting the adán "God is most great.
At right angles, touching the mosque, was such a house as one can see only in the East fantastically old, fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing hideous windows, like windows in the slum of a town set above coal-pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work.
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