Sunset Call to Prayer

Five times to day, the muezzin (chanter) calls the faithful to prayer.  I’m not sure about the daily schedule, or whether it changes with the calendar, but I do know that the first call is somehwere around 4 am!  The good part is that they only go on for a minute or so.  There’s a subsequent call that some mosques do, which basically tells everybody to fall into prayer lines. Nowadays most mosques use a loudspeaker and you hear echoes from all the surrounding buildings, so it sounds like the call is in stereo.  I think it’s also possible that all the nearby mosques would be calling at the same time, but it seems like by now they’d share the load with their neighboring muezzins.

I’m actually curious if the words are muezzin and minaret in Turkish – I think I originally learned all this when living in the Arab world.  Okay, I checked on my handy dictionary app, and they’re almost the same: müezzin and minare.