The quarter that has grown up around this mosque is one of the most picturesque in Constantinople. No very notable houses are there, but they all have the grave dignity which the Turks contrive to put into everything they do, and the streets take a tone from the great number of pious institutions that line them, interspersed with cypresses and tombs. The quarter is indeed, more than any other, the Pantheon of Stamboul, so many important personages have chosen to be buried near the friend of the Prophet. The pious Mehmed V, however, is the first sultan who has chosen to lie to the last day in the company of all those good and famous men. Several of the most notable mausoleums, though the most neglected, are of the period of Süleïman I, and built by Sinan. In one of them, separated from a little library by a porch of precious tiles, lies the Bosnian slave, nicknamed from his birthplace Sokollî Mehmed, whose destiny it was to become the Treasurer of Süleïman, successor to the terrible admiral Barbarossa, and Grand Vizier of the empire. When his imperial master died on the battle-field of Szigeth, in Hungary, Mehmed Pasha succeeded in hiding the fact until Selim II could reach Constantinople. The young sultan was the worst who had yet ascended the throne, but he stood in such awe of his father’s great minister that Sokollî ruled the empire throughout Selim’s reign and part of that of Mourad III. Three hundred years before De Lesseps he conceived the idea of the Suez Canal, and might have carried it out had he lived. He was murdered in 1579—at the instigation, it was whispered, of the jealous and cruel Lala Moustafa Pasha. The latter also has a place in this Turkish Pantheon. He was the barbarian who flayed alive Marcantonio Bragadin, the heroic defender of Famagusta, and stuffed his skin with straw. Having been paraded before the troops in Cyprus and hung up in the Arsenal at Kassîm Pasha for the edification of the galley-slaves, this bloody trophy was at last presented to the Venetians, who gave it honourable burial in their own Pantheon of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Lala Moustafa was himself of Christian origin, being of the same Serb race as Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the admiral Pialeh Pasha, and still another son-in-law of the imperial house who lies in Eyoub, Ferhad Pasha, a vizier of Mourad III and Mehmed IV. Although not born in the faith, Ferhad Pasha was renowned for the beauty of his calligraphy. Among this group of mausoleums is that of one real Turk, the celebrated Sheï’h ül Islam Ebou Sououd Effendi, who drew up and interpreted the laws of Süleïman.