The Milion Stone & the Basilica Cistern
Why is it significant?
Before you go underground, find the battered marble pillar standing alone behind a low railing near the tram stop. It looks like nothing, a broken gatepost that nobody bothered to remove. In fact it is all that is left of the Milion, the zero point of the Byzantine world.
Key Facts
| Place | The Milion Stone & the Basilica Cistern |
|---|---|
| Address | Alemdar, Yerebatan Caddesi No:1/3, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.00840, 28.97790 |
| Part of Walk | Constantinople Underfoot: Byzantine Istanbul Beneath Sultanahmet |
| Generated | Generated |
Before you go underground, find the battered marble pillar standing alone behind a low railing near the tram stop. It looks like nothing, a broken gatepost that nobody bothered to remove. In fact it is all that is left of the Milion, the zero point of the Byzantine world.
In the fourth century a monumental arch crowned by a dome stood on this spot, and road distances across the empire were counted from it, just as Rome counted from its golden milestone in the Forum. A traveller in Thessaloniki or Antioch read the miles to Constantinople measured from this very place. The fragment only came to light during excavations in the 1960s... the zero of an empire had been lying under a few metres of later city.
Now go down the steps into the Basilica Cistern, built under Justinian around 532. It takes its name from the great colonnaded basilica that once stood above it. Down there, three hundred and thirty-six columns stand in twelve rows, rising out of shallow water in the half-dark. When it was full, the cistern held around eighty thousand cubic metres of water, brought by aqueduct from far outside the walls to supply the Great Palace and its neighbourhood.
In the far corner, two columns rest on huge carved heads of Medusa, one lying on its side, the other upside down. Nobody knows where they came from, probably an older Roman building plundered for stone, and nobody knows why they were set like that. To neutralise the gaze, some say... or simply because that is how they fitted.
After the Ottoman conquest the cistern was half forgotten. In the 1540s a French scholar, Petrus Gyllius, heard that people in the houses above lowered buckets through holes in their cellars, and even pulled up fish. He went down and explored it by boat, by torchlight. James Bond followed four centuries later, in From Russia with Love. Climb back into the daylight and follow Divan Yolu west, then slip left into the lanes behind the courthouse, towards another cistern most visitors never find.