Tag: ottoman

All the articles with the tag "ottoman".

• Hagia Sophia: The Cathedral That Became a Mosque That Became a Cathedral

  Published: 29 May, 2026

  • 10 min read

  Hagia Sophia stood as the largest cathedral on earth for nine hundred years before becoming a mosque. The building under the layers is stranger than either.

• The Painter Who Made the Bosphorus Famous: Aivazovsky's Tophane, 1884

  Published: 22 May, 2026

  • 9 min read

  Ivan Aivazovsky painted Constantinople nearly forty times. The 1884 view of the Tophane mosque is the one that explains why he kept going back.