Five times a day Istanbul turns from a city of sights into a city of sound. What you're hearing, and how to listen.
The ezan announces that one of the five obligatory prayer times has begun: dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, night. The first muezzin was Bilal, calling at dawn from a high house in Medina in 622 or 623.
Think the calls are synchronised? They aren't. There's no central system; in 2020 Diyanet's president, Ali Erbaş, said that each mosque's imam recites his own. The overlapping chorus is many separate voices.
The timing is astronomy: Diyanet works out each day's times from the sun's apparent movement and each place's latitude and longitude, plus religious criteria. Midday begins five minutes after solar noon; sunset prayer, seven minutes after sunset. So the call drifts through the year.
Istanbul took the craft of the call seriously. The palace had its own style, the saray tavrı. Bayezid II, who reigned 1481–1512, created the post of chief muezzin. And çifte ezan meant two muezzins calling in turn.
The dawn call carries an extra line: prayer is better than sleep. And from 1932, for eighteen years, the ezan was sung in Turkish, "Tanrı uludur". The Arabic call returned in June 1950.
An Istanbul footnote: in November 2019 the city's Mufti moved the morning call to imsak time, because winter commuters couldn't reach work after dawn prayer.
Our pick: the Süleymaniye garden, or Sultanahmet Square between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, at sunset. Check the day's time on Diyanet's site or an app, arrive early, then stand still and quiet until it ends. This is worship, not a performance: don't film people praying. Expect mosques to pause sightseeing around each call and on Friday midday; the windows weren't confirmed when we checked, so read what's posted.
