This is a stitched vertical panorama taken inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

Click here for the larger version.

The pano sort of communicates the scale of the interior of the mosque, but… like most places we saw in Turkey and had known or read about before we went seeing them these places definitely left you with a loss for words. Ayasofya is the most obvious structure that will leave you feeling literally and figuratively much, much, much smaller. The Blue Mosque, overlooking the Sultanahmet neighborhood where we stayed and a huge visual presence from the rooftop patio of our hotel, was another.

Here’s another panorama made from pictures taken inside the Ayasofya.

This was done with a (relatively) cheap Canon OneShot digital camera, and the images were touched up in Photoshop and stitched using DoubleTake, which I bought over the Internet while in Cappadocia. (And while talking via Skype with my youngest brother while late afternoon call-to-prayers where being sung out in Goreme, in the valley below the inn we were staying.) (Not that I spent any time on the Internet.)

Sweets on display in a shop window. You can see baklava in the back, lokum (aka Turkish delight), and rice pudding on the bottom. All delicious!

Going through the pictures, trying to organize, and still I have amazing memories (and some okay photos) of the shipping traffic of the Bosporus, stuff moving past Istanbul to and from the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.

Here’s one showing ferries, tankers, and to the left on the horizon Maiden’s Tower, where Hero and Leander met, and where a James Bond villain (or more?) set up a base-of-operations.