Eyüp Sultan a second time

On the last night of Ramadan, we went to Eyup Sultan masjid (this is the second time I’ve been there). It reputedly holds the tomb of one of the Sahabah, and a footprint of the Prophet (salallahu alayhe wa sallam). It certainly contains the tombs and graves of many Ottoman emperors and officials.

Eyup Sultan is always busy, but on that night the courtyard, the paved square outside the gates, and the nearby streets were thronged with people, milling about and jockeying for spots big enough to lay down mats.

My host’s large family somehow scored a spot inside the courtyard near the relics, and we ate pizza and orange drink after the Maghrib athan and then prayed inside.

It is not unusual to see trees like these in masjids and historic sites in Istanbul, often over 500 years old.

People line up to see the tomb of the Sahabi (radiallahu anhu) and the footprint of the Prophet Muhammad (salallahu alayhe wa sallam).

After praying Maghrib, the whole family hiked up a cobblestoned path up the side of a very large hill next to the masjid, overlooking the Golden Horn. From a distance, this hill looks like a huge jumble of white blocks and trees – it is covered with tightly packed marble tombs dating from Ottoman times to the present, with trees planted among them here and there, and threaded with tiny footpaths trodden by all the people who visit the tombs. It was very dark, and all the surfaces were covered with worm-like centipedes as big as my fingers. It was a little creepy.

Up near the top of the hill was a brightly lit cafe, where people sat at little tables next to the tombs, smoking and drinking sweet tea. Cable cars ran up the side of the hill, and the passengers took an elevator up to a cobbled viewpoint overlooking the cemetery, the Bosphorus, and the Asian side of Istanbul across the water. The city and the two bridges between the continents were brightly lit and very beautiful. People took turns standing on a stool to look through a telescope at the city, and had a good laugh when my turn came and I just stood on the ground below the stool – at 5’5 I'm taller than a lot of people here.



Up at the top of the hill was a small masjid, a tea shop, and an ancient hand-pumped well purported to be ‘like Zamzam,’ having healing powers. People were lining up to pump water and drink it out of a tin cup on a chain, but I didn't drink because I didn't want to risk getting sick.

My we sat around outside the masjid drinking tea and well-water, and then all walked back down through the cemetery.

There are some gorgeous photos of people in the masjıd courtyard here, and some interesting epitaphs from tombstones here (I don't understand Turkish well enough to translate them).

Cities of the Dead

At Eyup Sultan Masjid in Istanbul (built by the Ottomans in 1458 AD), the tomb of Sokullu Mehmet Pasa, a sixteenth century AD Ottoman vizier, whose last known descendant passed away a few months ago. The masjid is located near the supposed grave of Khalid ibn Zaid ibn Kulayb, a companion of the Prophet (sallalahu alayhe wa sallam) who participated in the seventh century AD Muslim conquest of Istanbul. Many Ottoman officials are buried near the masjid.

An iris flowering on another grave in downtown Istanbul.

One of the things that struck me about Istanbul was the sheer number of people who have died in the city. Many of the graves I saw dated from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but even still everywhere I went there were vast graveyards, or old graves squeezed in next to the street.

I was on a bus to Eyup, and I saw a small mountain on the Golden Horn, overlooking the sea. It appeared to be covered with square white limestone rock formations, interspersed with trees, but when I got closer I realized that the whole mountain was covered in white stone tombs about the size of coffins, all jumbled together. Families bearing flowers picked paths among the tombs, winding their way up the mountain to tend the graves of their loved ones.

Most of the monuments at Eyup Sultan dated from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which puzzled me for a while, because they were in the Ottoman style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the carvings were mostly perfectly legible. Had the Ottomans built new monuments for ancient graves? If so, why were they all so close in age? It took me far longer than it should have to realize that they were using the hijri calendar. The current hijri year is 1431.

Just the number of people who died and merited monuments in this one city in the past two centuries is hard to grasp; I can’t imagine how many people will rise up on Judgement Day.