Around the Blue Mosque - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 111

southern end of the At Meydanı before it burned down in the late
1970s . It has since been restored and serves as the office of the rector
of Marmara University. The primary school, which has recently been
restored, is elevated above the northern wall of the outer precinct of
the mosque.
The large medrese, dwarfed somewhat by the great scale of the
mosque itself, is just outside the precinct wall towards the north-west.
It is rectangular in plan, with 24 cells arrayed around the four sides of
a portico, with its entrance at the west end of the north portico. The
lavatories are located at the south-eastern corner of the building.
The large square türbe is just beside the medrese to the south. Here
are buried, besides Ahmet I, his wife Kösem and three of his sons,
Murat IV, Osman II and Prince Beyazit. Prince Beyazit, the Bajazet of
Racine's great tragedy, was killed by his brother, the terrible Murat IV,
who now shares the türbe with him. Osman II, as Evliya Çelebi tells
us, was “put to death in the Castle of the Seven Towers by the com-
pression of his testicles, a mode of execution reserved by custom to
the Ottoman Emperors.” And Kösem, as we know, was strangled to
death in the Harem. This extraordinary woman had dominated the
Harem for half a century during the reigns of her husband, Ahmet
I, two of her sons, Murat IV and Ibrahim, and the early years of that
of her grandson, Mehmet IV. She was originally named Anastasia,
the daughter of a Greek priest on the Aegean isle of Tinos, and was
sold into the Harem when she was only 13. Sultan Ahmet renamed
her Kösem, or Leader of the Flock, since she was first in a group of
slave girls presented to him one morning. She was also known as
Mahpeyker, or Visage of the Moon, because of her great beauty.
THE HIPPODROME
As we have noted previously, the square in front of Sultan Ahmet
Camii is located on the site of the ancient Hippodrome. It has often
been remarked that just as Haghia Sophia was the centre of the
religious life of Constantinople, so the Hippodrome was the centre
of its civil activities. The interests and the passions of the populace
were about equally divided between theological controversy and the
chariot races of the Hippodrome. Frequently, indeed, the two became