Budapest

I got up pretty early the next day, June 13, because we had decided that we would go over to Budapest and see the sights there. This we included myself, Fahrunnisa, Sermin Teyze, and a friend of theirs, Alper Amca, and his son, Ridvan. We all piled into his car and drove to Hungary to Budapest. It took around two-three hours, not very long. The border was very funny--there wasn't any passport control or anything, so unless you were driving with someone who knew where they were going you wouldn't have known that you'd just passed the border between two countries.

Once we got to Budapest, our first stop was the tomb of Gul Baba. Its a very beautiful tomb and all around it are rose gardens--his name means Rose Father if you directly translate it, so the connection is obvious. Here's a picture of a part of the garden and the fountain there:
It's a very small, quiet, and beautiful tomb. Here's a picture of the inside of the tomb:
After visiting the tomb, we took a drive towards the river Danube and took pictures along its bank. Here's a picture of me:
And here's one of me and Fahrunnisa. Admittedly you don't see much background but its a nice photo :D
After walking around and taking pictures at the river bank, we got back in the car and drove to the Fishermen's Bastion, which is exactly what its name says: a bastion. The view was incredible, and the bastion itself was also incredible, so I think I spent more time taking pictures of the structure itself rather than the view. But here's a picture of one part of the bastion:
After walking through and around the bastion, we decided to walk around the entire place which really wasn't very big, and came across the grave of the last Turkish governor of Buda. Here's the picture of the headstone:
The engraving on it translates as: "After 145 years of Turkish sovereignty, the last governor of Buda, Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut Pasha, was slain near this spot in the afternoon of the 2nd day of September, 1686 at the 70th year of his life. He was a heroic enemy, may he rest at ease!"

After walking around some more, we decided to go on to the Estergon Kalesi. Its a very small but important fortress, and its very old. There's a church in the compound, and when one goes into the fortress itself, there's a small area where they display all of the bells that have ever hung in the church, and they date back to the 400s and 500s. One thing to note here: when we went and walked around the fortress, there were no signs that the Ottomans had ever been there. The fact that these bells were there, and the fact that there were bells from the time the Ottomans were there shows that the Ottomans respected the traditions of the local population and did what they could to foster and nurture a safe environment for them to keep on practicing their own religion. Not too many other empires who would allow for that kind of freedom. Here's a picture of the fortress from the other side of the river looking back towards it:
Apologies for the presence of the bridge but it really is the best photo I was able to take in the circumstances of being in the car on a road.

The reason I mention the tolerance and respect of the Ottomans has many reasons, but the most prominent is this: on the other side of the Danube river, right across from the Estergon Kalesi, there is supposed to be another fortress, much like it, maybe smaller, called Cigerdelen. This is the general area of where it is supposed to be:
The Cigerdelen fortress is supposed to be around the area from the end of the bridge on the opposite bank and to the right end of the photo--that's where it should have been. As you can see, nothing is there. Completely destroyed. Every stone taken away and who knows what's been done with them. We weren't able to walk around that area because we were running out of time, but I'm thinking that we probably wouldn't have found even the slightest indication anywhere around there that a fortress used to be there as well. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the Estergon fortress is still around and does provide us with an example of many politically sensitive things that shouldn't be gotten into in a blog.

It'd gotten pretty late by the time we finished walking around Estergon, so we decided that it was high time we head back to Vienna. Before we did that though, a random Turkish person who'd heard us speaking in Turkish came up and told us that there was a mosque being renovated by Turks that we should see so we decided to try and figure out where that mosque was. We were able to find it; it's a very spread out mosque that is actually somewhat small when it comes to the prayer space, but one can see that it was made to serve the needs of the people around it in every way possible, not just for prayer. I don't have many good photos of the mosque, but if anybody wants to visit it someday, I highly recommend going there.

Having discovered the mosque and paid our respects to the past generations of ancestors that we all probably have coming from there, we piled back in the car and drove back to Vienna. The journey continues in Sarajevo!!