Dealing With The Dead In Istanbul

In a city as old and as large as Istanbul, people regularly die - no great surprise there. The trouble is the land North Americans have available for cemeteries simply does not exist in a city like Istanbul, and clearly thishas been an issue for a very long time. So what do you do with the dead?
In one solution familiar to Western culture, a cemetery located adjacent to a mosque has been used. The first few photos are of a cemetery adjacent to the Kucuk Aya Sofya (Lesser Aya Sofya), a small but very nice mosque located a few hundred metres southwest of the Sultanahmet Camii/Blue Mosque, against the old Byzantian city wall. Here you find burial plots, marked by the unusually capped headstones, packed as tightly as possible in all the open space not occupied by the mosque and its walkways. Furthermore, the topmost sections of older burial plots' headstones have been mounted on iron rods into the wall. The markers themselves are absent. It is not clear whether this was simply to preserve remnants of markers for older burial plots which have been found in the area and lack a clear link to a grave, or whether some more deliberate process exists to reuse burial plots.
The oddly shaped topmost ornaments are apparently representative of old headdresses, albeit in a somewhat stylized form


In addition to such mosque-based cemeteries, as you walk about the older sections of he city that have been redeveloped, you periodically find small cemeteries crowded into small plots surrounded by apartment buildings or commercial buildings. Two examples are shown from back streets off Hudayendigar Caddesi southeast of the train station.



In the old downtown section of Istanbul, the living and the dead reside side-by-side.