Tag Archives: museums

Dolmabahçe Mosque

Now Live: Istanbul Recap Video

After reviewing ~800 video clips and spending countless hours editing a fraction of those, the Istanbul highlight reel is finally here!

All the Best from Budapest!

I realize that, with our sparse writing of late, it is probably difficult to tell where we are these days. Well, we have been in Budapest now for a few weeks, and we’ll be here until July. There is still so much to write about in the other cities we’ve been to, so it’s really quite difficult to catch up. On top of that, we visited several more cities along the way.

Byzantine Istanbul Part II: The Great Palace Mosaics

The museum itself is small, including floor mosaics of about 250 square meters, or about 2700 square feet. But archaeologists estimate that only one-seventh to one-eighth of the floor remains. To put that into perspective, we are talking about nearly half an acre of mosaic flooring. That’s something like an area from the 50 yard line to the goal line on an American football field. Archaeologists have suggested that it may have taken 80 million tesserae, the small, square tiles of limestone, glass, and ceramic that make up the mosaics.