Submitted by Meral Crifasi on Fri, 11/20/2009 - 17:19
I am planning a week-long trip to Istanbul with my husband and two young boys for Christmas holidays and the New Year. The main focus of the holiday will be visiting my family who live in Istanbul and catching up with friends. Each time we are back home my French husband gets restless in a family environment with too much Turkish language around him that he understands very little of, and wants to be the sightseeing tourist wondering the streets.
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is built on the banks of the River Tigris, and has a relatively short - if full and bloody - history by Middle Eastern standards, having only been founded in the 8th century AD.
During the Islamic Golden Age, Baghdad was one of the largest and most powerful cities in the world, equalled perhaps only by Cordoba, Spain. It stagnated and eventually declined, however, first as trouble stirred within the Caliphate, then once the Mongols invaded in 1258, brutally sacking the city, murdering most of its inhabitants and essentially sealing the Islamic Civilization's fate.
Mecca is the first city of Islam, and the holiest place on the planet in Muslim eyes. Its most famous and significant landmark - the Kaaba, a cuboidal building surrounded by a mosque and other structures - is believed to have been the first builing erected there, by Hebrew and Muslim patriarch Abraham in 2000 BC.
Pre-Islam, the city was most significant as a key economic hub, particularly in the spice trade (it remains a key trading centre to this day). After Muhammed's birth in the city in 570 AD and his long fight to unite Arabians behind the religion, which lasted up until the prophet's death in 632 AD, the city became inextricably linked with Islam.
This Saturday throngs of visitors from across North America will head to the Royal Ontario Museum, the crown jewel of Canada’s cultural scene, to see one of the most important, and mysterious, texts in antiquity, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World features fragments from Genesis, Daniel, The Book of War, Psalms, Daniel and the Messianic Apocalypse. It also features artefacts from the site they were found (Qumran), as well as Jewish artefacts from Jerusalem and Sepphoris.
Córdoba was once the thriving capital of the Caliphate of Córdoba, which ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula. It has been estimated that at its peak in the 10th century it had up to 500,000 inhabitants, making it the largest city in Western Europe, and perhaps the world.
After its recapture by the Christians, they were so impressed by the its beauty at the hands of the Muslims that they left it standing. Its greatest architectural feature – the grand mosque – became their cathedral, creating the extraordinary church-mosque we see today. Many of the ancient city’s splendours can still be witnessed today in modern Córdoba’s old town.
Carthage is a legendary ancient city. As a trading centre it was dominant in the Mediterranean, and its people were famous for the immense artistic and intellectual contributions to civilization. Sadly, it was later laid to waste by the attacking Romans in the Punic wars, who then refounded it, before suffering expulsion themselves at the hands of the Muslims in the 7th century AD.
The biggest city in modern Turkey has been a cross-roads of European, Asian and world history for many centuries. Powerful empires have one after another, in an unbroken chain dating back as far 667 BC, made it one of the centres of their world and a hotbed of political, religious and artistic activity. Its strategically advantageous position on the Bosphorus peninsula between the Balkans and Anatolia, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean is its major strength.
Merv, an oasis city in modern-day Turkmenistan, is one of the most important historical cities on the renowned Silk Road, near the modern city of Mary. Its location in the middle of Central Asia has made it a melting pot for world cultures, politics and conflict; it is even estimated to have once been the largest city in the world in the 12th century AD.
Merv has been inhabited since the 3rd millennium BC, and it was ruled intermittently by Persian tribes until its re-founding at the hands of Cyrus the Great; the first Persian emperor at around 550 BC. According to legend, Alexander the Great visited Merv, and the city was renamed Alexandria in his honour, following his death. Under Ardashir I, the Sassanids took control of Merv at around 230 AD - yet their stranglehold on the city was broken by an Arab invasion following the death of the last Sassanid ruler Yazdegard, in 651. Merv then became an Islamic city.
In 1037 a group of Turks seized Merv peacefully. Thus followed an era of prosperity for the city, which became the capital of the eastern Islamic world with a great library and, most importantly, a huge marketplace. It is during this epoch, between 1145 to 1153 that Merv, with a population of around 200,000, was possibly the largest city in the world.
It also features artefacts from the site they were found (
