Saturday, June 25, 2011

Friday, June 24, 2011

A mosque on the Danube river


Once, I was travelling home from Turkey to Bosnia, and as the bus was crossing the Bulgaria, it went north, all the way up to the Danube river, which is the natural border of Bulgaria and Romania. But some one hundred years ago, it was also the northernmost part of the Ottoman empire, namely its Rumeli (European) part. We were travelling through some Bulgarian picaresque villages, with all the corn fields and oak forests, and suddenly.... I saw remains of a mosque, a typical Ottoman mosque, with its dome collapsed, stone walls and most of the minaret still standing, and on top of it, where sherefet used to be, a giant white stork was standing in a nest she had built up there. In the background, I could see the Danube river, and all beyond it was the flat endless Romania.
That was a scene I've been carring somewhere inside my head for 10 years now, and I tried to find it on Googleearth but in vain. So I thought that at least I could draw it, and here it is. 
My daymare.