Sixteen centuries ago, in the year of 330, the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor chose the city, then a small Greek town, to be his capital. No one quite knows why. One thing sure though, the great warrior emperors had left Rome and cities of the west for ever.

 

This mosque, the mosque of the Turkish Sultan who conquered the city, is built straight on the foundations in the most ancient burial church of the mysterious emperors of old Byzantium. What then was this most ancient half-forgotten empire—— the Empire of Byzantium?

 

Byzantium! That magic, spicy word! Now, imagine that the empires of Greece and Rome had never died, but had been fused together in a single empire set between East and West. And imagine that the emperors of this kingdom, the sacred emperors could be torn into pieces by the mobs in the street, emperors who could mutilate their courtiers and children, could kill their priests and blind whole armies of invaders, yet emperors whose artists made some of the most finest, the most exquisite images the world has ever seen——visions of heaven and earth, sublime architectures, copied by everybody from the caliphs of Bagdad to the Popes of Rome, the Kings of Germany and the tribes of Nubia, visions of heaven’s order and earthly power, that still lie deep within the modern world. Just as this mosque, the conquerors’ mosque, stands on the ruins of Byzantium, so do you!