It covers a vast space. The great court which surrounds it seems constantly to be filled with a great market. It is in the heart of life: crowds are constantly passing through, pilgrims from S. Sophia, travellers who have turned in from the Hippodrome. The air of the buyers and sellers is more _dilettante_ than that of the serious folk who make their homely purchases among the stalls outside the great mosque of Mohammed II. This seems an oriental scene decked out for your amusement. But the place has a long and tragic history. Part of the area covered by the buildings of the mosque was once occupied by the great palace of the Emperors; part was the Hippodrome; here too, probably, was the Augustæum. It was not for more than a hundred years after the conquest that the Turks built upon this site. Then (1608-14) Ahmed I. determined to raise a memorial of his piety finer than any of his predecessors had achieved, and if it might be, by a propitiatory offering, to stay the decline which had already begun to fall upon the Empire. He worked himself at the building, it is said, and paid the workmen with his own hands. The fore-court has a beautiful fountain. The interior of the mosque itself is larger than the Suleimaniyeh. Its fault is sameness. Fergusson, whose judgment is not always to be quoted, may here speak without contradiction. "If the plan were divided into quarters, each of the four quarters would be found to be identical, and the effect is consequently painfully mechanical and prosaic. The design of each wall is also nearly the same; they have the same number of windows spaced in the same manner, and the side of the Kibleh[64] is scarcely more richly decorated than the others." The prevailing blue of the whole becomes oppressive. There are some exquisite tiles; but the effect of the whole mosque is spoilt, like that of Suleiman, by the paint. Yet with all its defects the size makes the mosque magnificent. "A hall nearly two hundred feet square, with a stone roof supported by only four great fluted piers, is a grand and imposing object." Fergusson's judgment must be accepted. At the same time there are many points that no one who has seen them will ever forget. One is the view as you stand under the great columns of the arched court and look up at the almost innumerable domes, rising dome upon dome to the great central cupola that dominates them all, the one minaret that you see breaking the monotonous gradation of the domes by its sheer, sharp ascent into the sky. Another is the colossal strength of the four great piers from which spring the arches of the central cupola, immense in their solidity, yet hardly so clumsy as you think at first when you gaze from under them at the more graceful pillars of the outer arcade.