Eski Cami (Old Mosque)
These images are of calligraphic inscriptions on the walls and pillars of the Eski Cami (“Old Mosque”), a fifteenth-century Ottoman mosque in Edirne, Turkey. They consist of Qur’anic passages and of particular individual words freighted with religious force — Islamic calligraphy is both a devotional art form and a locus of apotropaic power. (Click on the photos to see larger versions.)
1. The word wahid (“one”) is superimposed over Allah (in outline only), so that together the composition can be read as “God is one.” 2. Hu, or “He,” meaning God. 3. Negative-space calligraphy (detail). 4. A doubled waw. The word wa means “and,” and in this context signifies union. 5. Mirror calligraphy on a pillar. 6. A large Allah (with praying man as punctuation mark).
Elizabeth Angell is a graduate student (among other things) in New York City. She blogs at verbal privilege.
qarrtsiluni 
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing these.
Marvellous. Glad they’re black and white. (I think…!)
yes, amazing. the signs made me think of both the Taj Mahal, and the OM-sign in buddhist regions, which seems to come with a same curved mood like “wahid”.
the black and white surely adds to the sense of timeless majety – i got curious, though, and photo googled the mosque, to see it in colour.
on a sidenote: verbal privilege is a great blog. thanks for sharing all those places and moments.
Fabulous!
These are stunning photographs, thank you. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in mosques in Istanbul, and you’ve perfectly captured the way I experienced the spiritual geometries of the architecture as much as of the calligraphy – I love these!
Thanks for the word apotropaic, as well as these lovely photos. I have some sort of half-formed thought about synesthesia. The mosque is likely to be fairly quiet, but the calligraphy is kind of (visually) loud in a way, like a superhuman voice speaking. It doesn’t “speak to me” as I can’t read it, but I wonder about how a reader of Arabic would experience it. Is it original to the mosque, or was it done in a later century?