Column of the Goths: Byzantion's Oldest Monument

Why is it significant?

At the far end of the park, near the tea gardens that look out over the water, find a single grey granite column standing on a high base, with a weathered Corinthian capital and nothing on top.

Key Facts

Open the walk

At the far end of the park, near the tea gardens that look out over the water, find a single grey granite column standing on a high base, with a weathered Corinthian capital and nothing on top. It is older than Constantinople, older than any emperor of Byzantium, and almost nobody stops to look at it. Whatever once stood on top of it is long gone.

On its base is a short Latin inscription, worn but still readable, dedicated to Fortune who returns, for the defeat of the Goths. Historians still argue over which victory it means. Some link it to Claudius the Second, who beat the Goths around 269 and was nicknamed Gothicus for it; others to Constantine himself. Either way, it is one of the oldest Roman monuments still standing in the city.

And it stands on the oldest ground. This promontory, between the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, was the acropolis of Byzantion, the Greek town founded according to tradition by colonists from Megara, led by a man called Byzas, in the seventh century before Christ. Temples stood here when Rome was still a village of huts, and the whole later story of the city grew out from this point.

Legend says Byzas asked the oracle at Delphi where to build, and was told to settle opposite the land of the blind. When he arrived he saw the earlier colony of Chalcedon on the Asian shore, where Kadıköy is now, and understood: only blind men could have ignored this perfect harbour and settled over there instead.

Byzantion, Constantinople, İstanbul: three names, one rock. Now leave the park by the gate near the sea and walk west along the shore road towards the Golden Horn, to a wooden-eaved pavilion sitting on the old palace wall.