I apologise in advance, this post will be patriotic, royalist and probably a tad jingoistic too. This weekend, as you cannot fail to have noticed, was Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee. 60 years on the throne (no jokes about a lack of fibre in her diet, please) were marked with a flotilla, a concert, and a service at St. Paul's Cathedral.
When European visitors to Ottoman Thessaloniki, in modern day Greece, described the city, the features which most captured their attention were the minarets. Exotic and highly visible the minaret captured the imagination of travellers searching for the Oriental, giving the city (in the words of one guidebook) the air of a fairy-tale:
"Are not the white minarets and the mysterious old houses, the storks on the roof, the beggar at the fountain, the very cobble-stones and above all, the deep blue sky and the star-strewn night the very essentials of magic and romance?"