Çemberlitaş: The Column of Constantine

Why is it significant?

Stand beside the tram tracks and tilt your head back at the tall, sooty column wrapped in iron rings like a barrel. It looks almost shabby among the shop signs and the rattling trams... and it is the oldest monument on this walk by more than a thousand years.

Key Facts

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Stand beside the tram tracks and tilt your head back at the tall, sooty column wrapped in iron rings like a barrel. It looks almost shabby among the shop signs and the rattling trams... and it is the oldest monument on this walk by more than a thousand years. In the year 330, the emperor Constantine dedicated his new capital on the Bosphorus, and this column stood at the centre of his oval forum. Its drums were cut from porphyry, the purple stone of emperors, quarried in Egypt. On top stood a bronze statue of Constantine himself, crowned with rays like the sun god. In 1106 a storm finally threw that statue down, and the Byzantines put a cross in its place. Then there are the legends of what lies underneath. The story goes that Constantine buried a hoard of holy relics at the foot of the column: the adze Noah used to build the ark, the baskets from the miracle of the loaves, and even the Palladium, the wooden statue of Athena that Aeneas was said to have carried from Troy to Rome. Nobody has ever dug to check. Which, if you think about it, is the best way to keep a legend alive. Fire was the real enemy. The great blazes that swept this quarter cracked the stone, and it was bound with iron hoops, renewed by the Ottomans, to stop it splitting. That is the Turkish name: Çemberlitaş, the hooped stone. English travellers called it the Burnt Column, and a fire in 1779 left it blacker still. And just behind you, the domes of the Çemberlitaş Hamamı were designed by Mimar Sinan in 1584, the architect whose city you are about to walk through. So here is the idea of this walk. You start with Rome's Constantinople and finish with Sinan's İstanbul, and in between, you will climb the third hill and see how the Ottomans rewrote a Byzantine skyline. Cross the tram line, turn into the street that leads north towards the bazaar, and look for a mosque that seems to be made of light.