Tel: 020 7437 8553
charles@finearttravel.co.uk
jane@finearttravel.co.uk
Press Articles
Spectator, 22 May 2010
Broaden your mind
Philip Mansel is one of the lecturers on out five-day tour of Istanbul. Twenty-eight of us are staying in a former prison, transformed by the Four Seasons, the courtyard now a flowering garden and its rooftop a superb vantage point from which to experience the Turkish sunset. Later our group gathers on the jasmine-scented roof for wine and meze. On our right is Hagia Sophie, the exquisite Byzantine church turned mosque. To our left is the dome of the blue mosque and its six minarets that provoked hostility for daring to rival the architecture of Mecca itself. Not bad for a jail, I muse. When the muezzins begin their evening call prayer, their thin walls weave themselves over our rooftop into a single musical strand, 'solemn and beautiful beyond all the bells in Christendom', as Byron wrote when visiting Istanbul in 1810. Against the darkening sky still smudged with pink, pigeons swoop past the minarets and a silver silver moon. As the muezzins' calls reach their crescendo, we are unanimously enchanted and I glimpse one of our number surreptitiously dabbing her tears with the scarf she brought earlier from the Grand Bazaar.