Bukoleon Palace: The Emperors' Windows on the Sea
Why is it significant?
Walk along the inland side of the busy coastal road and watch the old sea wall beside you until three great marble window frames appear, with a gateway and broken arches, open to the sky. Behind them there is nothing but bushes and pigeons.
Key Facts
| Place | Bukoleon Palace: The Emperors' Windows on the Sea |
|---|---|
| Address | Sultan Ahmet, Kennedy Caddesi, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.00230, 28.97620 |
| Part of Walk | Constantinople Underfoot: Byzantine Istanbul Beneath Sultanahmet |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the inland side of the busy coastal road and watch the old sea wall beside you until three great marble window frames appear, with a gateway and broken arches, open to the sky. Behind them there is nothing but bushes and pigeons. That is what remains of the Bukoleon, the seaside palace of the Byzantine emperors.
The name comes from a sculpture that once stood at its private harbour: a bull fighting a lion, bous and leon in Greek. The Great Palace spread over the whole slope from Hagia Sophia down to the water, and here the emperor could step straight from his rooms onto his boats. The sea itself came right up to these walls. The road you are walking on was built on land reclaimed in the twentieth century.
On a winter night in 969, the emperor Nikephoros the Second Phokas was murdered in his bedchamber in this palace. The chroniclers say the conspirators came by boat in a snowstorm and were hauled up the wall in a basket, and that the empress Theophano was in on the plot. The man who struck the blow, the general John Tzimiskes, was her lover, and he became the next emperor.
In 1204 the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade took this palace without a fight, and the knights who entered its treasure rooms wrote about them with open astonishment. In the 1870s the new railway line along the coast cut through what was left of the palace grounds, and the coastal road did the rest.
Look at the stone brackets that once held a balcony out over the water, and imagine an emperor looking across the Sea of Marmara to the hills of Asia. Restoration work has been going on here in recent years, and archaeologists keep finding more of the palace behind the wall. Now cross back inland and climb the lanes uphill to the Arasta Bazaar, where the palace floor itself has survived.