Edirne
First off, let me take back all the nice things I said about Bulgarian food. In Turkey, every dish in every restaurant is tastier by a factor of four. Even at the divey place we had lunch yesterday, every stew was delicious. And the roadside stalls? More deliciousness. Tastiness is the order of the day on every corner of every street, and I couldn’t be happier.
Edirne has one of the great mosques of Turkey, from the heyday of the Ottoman empire, and Hazel and I walked through it both last night and this morning. Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything in the western architectural tradition that matches the splendor of some of these Islamic works. The contrast of the pointiness of the minaret with the roundness of the dome, the smoothness of the arches with the baroqueness of the ornamenation, all creates a kind of perfectly balanced gestalt.