Kadırga: The Lost Harbour of Julian and Sophia
Why is it significant?
Stand in the little park at Kadırga among the plane trees, the apartment blocks and the children's swings, and notice how flat and low the ground is at the bottom of the hill. Nothing here looks special. But you are standing on the floor of a harbour.
Key Facts
| Place | Kadırga: The Lost Harbour of Julian and Sophia |
|---|---|
| Address | Şehsuvar Bey, Kadırga Parkı, 34130 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.00450, 28.96900 |
| Part of Walk | Constantinople Underfoot: Byzantine Istanbul Beneath Sultanahmet |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the little park at Kadırga among the plane trees, the apartment blocks and the children's swings, and notice how flat and low the ground is at the bottom of the hill. Nothing here looks special. But you are standing on the floor of a harbour.
In the year 362 the emperor Julian, the last pagan emperor, built a new harbour on this shore of the Sea of Marmara, sheltered from the north winds. Some two centuries later Justin the Second rebuilt it and named it after his wife, the empress Sophia. For centuries grain ships, merchant boats and warships of Constantinople tied up at quays roughly where these houses now stand.
The Ottomans kept using it after the conquest. They called it Kadırga Limanı, the harbour of the galleys, because the sultan's war galleys were moored and repaired here in the early Ottoman decades, before the great naval arsenal grew up on the Golden Horn. The neighbourhood still carries the name, and the street running west is Kadırga Limanı Caddesi... the street of a harbour that is no longer there.
Little by little the basin silted up and was filled in, and the city simply grew over it. Nothing of the quays is visible today. The harbour survives only in a name and in this unexpectedly level ground at the foot of the hills.
And this city still has surprises for its archaeologists. A little further west, at Yenikapı, digging for the Marmaray rail tunnel uncovered another Byzantine harbour, the harbour of Theodosius, with more than thirty sunken ships, and traces of people living on that shore thousands of years before Constantinople existed. Now walk east along the flat streets, with the sea somewhere on your right beyond the houses, to a small domed mosque in a quiet garden.