Binbirdirek: The Cistern of a Thousand and One Columns
Why is it significant?
Find the modest door on the little square behind the big courthouse and step down into a forest of columns that is somehow taller and stranger than the famous one you just left. This is Binbirdirek Sarnıcı, the cistern of a thousand and one columns, which is an Istanbul way of saying a great many.
Key Facts
| Place | Binbirdirek: The Cistern of a Thousand and One Columns |
|---|---|
| Address | Binbirdirek, İmran Öktem Caddesi No:4, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.00760, 28.97440 |
| Part of Walk | Constantinople Underfoot: Byzantine Istanbul Beneath Sultanahmet |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the modest door on the little square behind the big courthouse and step down into a forest of columns that is somehow taller and stranger than the famous one you just left. This is Binbirdirek Sarnıcı, the cistern of a thousand and one columns, which is an Istanbul way of saying a great many.
The real number is two hundred and twenty-four, and each column is in fact two shafts stacked one on top of the other, joined by a stone ring in the middle. The cistern is older than the Basilica Cistern, begun in the fourth or fifth century, and it is traditionally linked to Philoxenos, one of the senators who followed Constantine from Rome to his new capital. It is the second-largest covered cistern in the city.
Above and around it stood the mansions of the court elite. One of them belonged to a palace official called Lausus, who filled his halls with famous ancient statues. According to Byzantine chroniclers, his collection included the great Zeus of Olympia, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the gold and ivory god may have ended its days in a great fire that swept these streets in the year 475.
Look closely at the shafts. Some of them carry small Greek letters and monograms cut by the stonemasons, signatures fifteen centuries old. In Ottoman times, when the cistern had run dry, its cool and damp halls were used by silk spinners, because the moisture kept the fine thread from snapping.
For much of the twentieth century it was choked with earth and rubbish, a ruin under a car park of a neighbourhood. It was cleared and restored in the early 2000s, and today it hosts concerts and exhibitions under its brick vaults... one of the great Byzantine spaces of the city, and still a place most people pass without a glance. Come back up and walk east, down the gentle slope, to the long open square ahead. That square was once a racetrack.