Çemberlitaş Column

The Column of Constantine, known as Çemberlitaş in Istanbul, is the city's oldest surviving monument, erected in 330 AD as a 50-meter pillar. Emperor Constantine the Great dedicated the purple porphyry column with both Christian and pagan rites, topping it with a bronze statue of himself as Apollo. After a 1779 fire scorched the stone, Sultan Abdülhamid the First wrapped the structure in protective iron hoops.

Istanbul · from the walk “Sultans, Spices & Hidden Streets” · audio ~3 min · Generated

Çemberlitaş Sütunu, Divan Yolu Cd., Fatih, İstanbul

Why is the Column of Constantine in Istanbul also known as the Burnt Column?

Look at this scarred, battered pillar rising above the traffic and the tram lines. It doesn't look like much now... but what you're seeing is the Oldest surviving monument in all of Istanbul. This is the Column of Constantine, known in Turkish as Çemberlitaş... the "Hooped Stone."

...... On the eleventh of May, three hundred and thirty A.D., Emperor Constantine the Great dedicated this column as the centerpiece of his brand new capital. Picture this: a circular forum lined with marble porticoes, a Senate House on one side, a monumental fountain on the other... and right here, at the center of it all, a column nearly fifty meters tall, made of rare purple porphyry stone shipped all the way from the deserts of Egypt. And at the very top? A colossal bronze statue of Constantine himself... depicted Nude, wearing a seven-pointed radiant crown, holding a spear and a globe. He was styled to look like the sun god Apollo, blazing golden in the dawn light over his citizens.......... Now here's where it gets strange. Constantine was the emperor who legalized Christianity. And yet his statue looked like a pagan god. The dedication ceremony on that May morning featured Both Christian hymns and pagan rites. Was he Christian? Was he pagan? The answer seems to be... deliberately both.......... And then there are the legends about what lies Beneath this column. Byzantine writers claimed Constantine buried an astonishing collection of relics in the foundation: fragments of the True Cross, the baskets from the loaves and fishes miracle, the ax Noah used to build the Ark, the rod of Moses... and alongside all of these Christian treasures, the Palladium — a wooden statue of the goddess aThena, supposedly stolen from ancient Troy by Odysseus himself and later taken to Rome. No excavation has ever confirmed any of it.......... A fierce gale toppled the great statue in eleven oh six. Crusaders looted the bronze laurel wreaths in twelve oh four. The Ottomans removed the cross that had replaced the statue. A devastating fire in seventeen seventy-nine scorched the stone black, earning it the name "The Burnt Column." Sultan Abdülhamid the First wrapped it in iron hoops and masonry just to keep it standing.......... Nearly seventeen hundred years of earthquakes, fires, conquests, and empires... and still it refuses to fall. A monument built on ambiguity — pagan and Christian, Roman and Byzantine, scorched but unbroken — standing quietly at the crossroads of civilizations.

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