Happy Ramazan Bayram

We are currently in the midst of a three day holiday. Aug 30 was both Zafer Bayram (Victory Day - celebration of the turning point in the Turkish War for Independence) and the first day of Ramazan Bayram (the holiday after Ramadan). Today and tomorrow are the last two days of the post-Ramadan holiday. This holiday is also sometimes called Sugar Holiday (since lots of people give each other sweets on these days), but I've been told by some of our Turkish friends that Sugar Holiday is the name used by the press (and probably by non-religious nationalists), but they (our particular friends) prefer to call it the Ramadan holiday.

During the holidays Turks go to visit friends and family, and public transportation is crowded. There are also lots of Turks strolling in the parks, eating ice cream, giving gifts to friends, and generally relaxing. The mosques have been particularly crowded as well.

We went to Eyup Mosque yesterday and it was mobbed. Getting into the inner courtyard is a press of bodies and a tight squeeze, but we made it. I will let one of the students tell you more about that (and if no one posts, I'll tell you all more about it). Eyup considered to be the most holy place in Istanbul because it is the burial place of the standard bearer of the Prophet Muhammad. There is both a mosque and a shrine there. Besides being a pilgrimage site, the mosque is noteworthy to me because it has the most expansive women's section of any mosque I've been in here. There is a balcony section above the main mosque floor but also two large rooms for women attached to the mosque and a bridge-gallery over the entrance to the outer courtyard. Women pray in the bridge, in both large rooms, and in the mosque balcony. We were there between prayer times, but there were still a lot of people praying in the mosque. Between prayer times women can be on the main floor of the mosque, but women who are praying will go to the women's section. Most of the women with the group went upstairs to sit with the women who were praying. Because the women generally care for the children who are too young to learn to pray, between prayer times there are always toddlers running around, women sitting and chatting, and in this particular mosque women reading scriptures in Arabic. This area also has a lot of stalls of booksellers selling religious literature in both Turkish and Arabic, and it's not unusual to find both men and women reading in the mosque or the shrine.