The Walled Obelisk & the Sphendone

Why is it significant?

Stop beside the tall, rough obelisk of stacked stones at the southern end of the square. Close up it looks battered, pocked with holes, as if something had been torn from it. Something was.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop beside the tall, rough obelisk of stacked stones at the southern end of the square. Close up it looks battered, pocked with holes, as if something had been torn from it. Something was.

Nobody is quite sure who first built it, but in the tenth century the emperor Constantine the Seventh restored it, and the inscription on its base compares it proudly to the Colossus of Rhodes. It was sheathed in plates of gilded bronze that blazed in the sun above the racetrack. The plates are long gone, stripped, it is said, by the crusaders in 1204, and the holes you see are where they were fixed. In Ottoman times, tradition says, young Janissaries showed off by climbing it.

Now walk past it to where the ground falls away, and start down the steep street on your right, Şehit Mehmet Paşa Yokuşu. Glance back and up: a huge curved wall of brick and stone with tiers of arches looms over the houses. That is the Sphendone, the rounded end of the Hippodrome. The racetrack needed a flat course on a hill that drops towards the sea, so the Byzantines simply built the ground, raising vaults until the track was level.

Up there, on top of those vaults, the chariots swung around the turn, the most dangerous moment of every race, where wheels locked and drivers were thrown. Today a university building stands on top, and most people walking above have no idea they are standing on the bend of the most famous racetrack of the Middle Ages.

It is one of the very few pieces of the Hippodrome still standing near its old height. Much of the rest was quarried, stone by stone, to build the Ottoman city. Keep going down the hill, it is steep, so take your time, to a mosque tucked into the slope on your left.