Great Palace Mosaic Museum & the Arasta Bazaar

Why is it significant?

Stroll along the shady row of shops of the Arasta Bazaar, with carpets and ceramics spilling out of every door, and find the entrance of the mosaic museum along the way.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stroll along the shady row of shops of the Arasta Bazaar, with carpets and ceramics spilling out of every door, and find the entrance of the mosaic museum along the way. Inside, you walk on a gangway above the floor of a Byzantine palace... a floor that people crossed some fourteen hundred years ago.

The Arasta itself was built in the early seventeenth century together with the Blue Mosque, as a street of shops whose rents helped to support the mosque. When archaeologists from the University of St Andrews dug behind it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, they found the mosaic pavement of a great colonnaded courtyard of the Great Palace, most likely laid in the sixth century.

There are no saints and no emperors on it. Instead, a whole world in tiny cubes of stone and glass: children riding a camel, a man milking a goat, hunters facing a tiger, an elephant wrestling a lion, an eagle tearing at a snake, and fantastic griffins. It is a picture book of country life and wild beasts, made for courtiers strolling around a palace garden.

Look closely at the faces and at the bodies of the animals. The craftsmen built up shadow and muscle with subtle changes of colour, some cubes barely bigger than a grain of rice, and the effect is almost like painting. The scenes were never meant to tell one story. They were meant to delight, to be discovered piece by piece as you walked.

The Great Palace was the seat of the emperors for some seven centuries, until they moved to the Blachernae palace by the land walls. After that, its halls decayed, and the Ottomans built over the ruins. This floor survived precisely because it was buried. Walk out to the end of the bazaar and climb the steps into the garden of the great mosque with six minarets.