Today a professor from the university here led a sightseeing tour of some of the famous mosques in the city. He took us to the Sulemaniye mosque built by the famous Sinan and a couple of other I have been meaning to see.

It was a pretty typical tour up until the point when he steps onto a stone near the wall of a mosque and declares that it is the most historical stone in the city. It doesn't look like much. It's kind of overgrown and there is a tree growing next to it. He points out a couple of grooves in the rock and explains to us that they are axe marks. Apparently this is the stone where all of the Jannissaries were killed in the 1820's. There were 40,000 of them.

The morbid part of my brain went "Whoah! Dude! 40,000 people were killed right here!" and the other half went "ugh". I took a picture of it.

Funny how some random obscure stone could have such significance, no?