Constantinople Underfoot: Byzantine Istanbul Beneath Sultanahmet
From Hagia Sophia and the zero-mile stone down into sunken cisterns, along the vanished Hippodrome, past a lost harbour to the emperors' palace on the sea walls: the Byzantine city still holding up Istanbul
Istanbul · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated
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1. Hagia Sophia: The Church of Holy Wisdom
Sultan Ahmet, Ayasofya Meydanı No:1, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Stand in the square between the two giants and turn towards the one that looks older and heavier, the colour of faded apricot, propped up by massive buttresses like an old man leaning on his sticks. That is Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom... and for almost a thousand years it was the largest church in the Christian world. Everything you will see on this walk orbits around it.
The building in front of you is the third church on this spot. The second one burned in 532, during the Nika riot, when the racing factions of the Hippodrome nearly toppled the emperor Justinian. He answered by building something nobody had ever seen. Two learned men rather than ordinary builders, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, designed it, and it was dedicated in December 537, less than six years after work began. The story goes that Justinian walked in and murmured that he had outdone Solomon.
The secret is the dome, more than thirty metres across and floating some fifty-five metres above the floor. A ring of forty windows runs around its base, so the light seems to pour in underneath it, and a writer of the time said it looked as if it hung from heaven on a golden chain. It did not float forever: an earthquake brought the first dome down in 558, and the replacement, built steeper and higher, is the one above you today.
Look for the small things too. On a marble parapet in the upper gallery, someone scratched runes that are read as a Norse name, Halfdan... most likely a Viking serving in the emperor's Varangian Guard who got bored during a very long service. And people still push a thumb into a hole in a bronze-clad column, the so-called weeping column, which legend says grants wishes and cures.
On the 29th of May 1453, after a siege of fifty-three days, Sultan Mehmed the Second entered the city, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Minarets rose around it, and many mosaics were covered with plaster rather than destroyed, which is partly why some survive. In 1934 it became a museum, and in July 2020 it was turned back into a mosque. Now walk west across the tram line, to a stump of stone that once measured the whole empire.
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2. The Milion Stone & the Basilica Cistern
Alemdar, Yerebatan Caddesi No:1/3, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
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.
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3. Binbirdirek: The Cistern of a Thousand and One Columns
Binbirdirek, İmran Öktem Caddesi No:4, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Find the modest door on the little square behind the big courthouse and step down into a forest of columns that is somehow taller and stranger than the famous one you just left. This is Binbirdirek Sarnıcı, the cistern of a thousand and one columns, which is an Istanbul way of saying a great many.
The real number is two hundred and twenty-four, and each column is in fact two shafts stacked one on top of the other, joined by a stone ring in the middle. The cistern is older than the Basilica Cistern, begun in the fourth or fifth century, and it is traditionally linked to Philoxenos, one of the senators who followed Constantine from Rome to his new capital. It is the second-largest covered cistern in the city.
Above and around it stood the mansions of the court elite. One of them belonged to a palace official called Lausus, who filled his halls with famous ancient statues. According to Byzantine chroniclers, his collection included the great Zeus of Olympia, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the gold and ivory god may have ended its days in a great fire that swept these streets in the year 475.
Look closely at the shafts. Some of them carry small Greek letters and monograms cut by the stonemasons, signatures fifteen centuries old. In Ottoman times, when the cistern had run dry, its cool and damp halls were used by silk spinners, because the moisture kept the fine thread from snapping.
For much of the twentieth century it was choked with earth and rubbish, a ruin under a car park of a neighbourhood. It was cleared and restored in the early 2000s, and today it hosts concerts and exhibitions under its brick vaults... one of the great Byzantine spaces of the city, and still a place most people pass without a glance. Come back up and walk east, down the gentle slope, to the long open square ahead. That square was once a racetrack.
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4. The German Fountain & the Head of the Hippodrome
Sultan Ahmet, Sultanahmet Meydanı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Walk up to the octagonal pavilion with dark green columns and a little bronze dome at the northern tip of the long square. Step underneath and look up into its dome: gold mosaic, with the monograms of two rulers woven into it, an Ottoman sultan and a German Kaiser.
This is the Alman Çeşmesi, the German Fountain, a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm the Second to Sultan Abdülhamid the Second, remembering the Kaiser's visit to the city in 1898. It was designed and made in Germany, shipped in pieces, and inaugurated in 1901 on the Kaiser's birthday. Its style is neo-Byzantine, a German idea of what Constantinople ought to look like... set down on the very spot where the real Byzantium once roared.
Because you are standing at the head of the Hippodrome. The square follows its outline almost exactly. Begun under Septimius Severus and enlarged by Constantine, it was around four hundred and fifty metres long and held perhaps a hundred thousand people. Up at this end were the starting gates for the chariots, and above them, the story goes, stood four gilded bronze horses.
The racing teams, the Blues and the Greens, were fan clubs, street gangs and political parties all at once. In January 532 they united against Justinian under the cry Nika, conquer, and set half the city on fire. The emperor was ready to flee until, according to the historian Procopius, the empress Theodora told the council that she would rather die an empress than live a fugitive. Troops were sent into the packed Hippodrome, and Procopius puts the dead at some thirty thousand.
And the bronze horses? In 1204 the knights of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, and the horses were shipped to Venice, where they still guard the basilica of San Marco. Now walk south along the square, past the stone monuments that stand in a line down its middle. The first of them is the oldest thing in the city.
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5. Obelisk of Theodosius & the Serpent Column
Sultan Ahmet, Sultanahmet Meydanı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Stand in front of the rose-coloured granite needle covered in hieroglyphs, then lower your eyes to its marble base, where an emperor sits in his box among courtiers and guards, holding out a wreath for the winner. You are looking at a stone some three and a half thousand years old, and at a portrait of the man who brought it here.
The obelisk was cut for Pharaoh Thutmose the Third and stood at the temple of Karnak in Egypt. In 390 the emperor Theodosius the First had it raised on the spine of the Hippodrome. What you see is only the upper part; the rest was probably broken in transport. One side of the base even shows the obelisk being hauled upright with ropes and winches, and the Greek and Latin inscriptions boast about the feat... though they cannot agree on how many days it took.
Now find the twisted bronze stump a few steps away, sunk in a pit. This is the Serpent Column, three bronze snakes coiled together. It was made after the Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea in 479 before Christ, paid for from the spoils, and set up at Delphi. The names of thirty-one Greek cities that fought are engraved on its coils. The serpents' heads once held up a golden bowl, and Constantine carried the whole thing off as a trophy for his new Rome.
For centuries the city treated it as a talisman: as long as it stood, the story goes, no snake could enter. The three heads were broken off around 1700. Part of one head survived, and it is kept in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, which is how we know what they looked like.
Notice too how deep the bases sit. The ground of the Hippodrome has risen a long way since Byzantine times, so the crowds who cheered the chariots walked well below your feet. Carry on south to the rough stone obelisk at the end of the square, where the racetrack once made its turn.
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6. The Walled Obelisk & the Sphendone
Sultan Ahmet, Sultanahmet Meydanı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
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.
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7. Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Mosque: Sinan's Jewel on the Slope
Küçük Ayasofya, Şehit Mehmet Paşa Yokuşu No:20, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Climb the steps from the street, pass under the gateway, and you find yourself in a small enclosed world: a domed ablution fountain in the middle of a courtyard, ringed by arcades of student cells. The whole complex is folded into the slope, so the prayer hall sits higher than the street you came from.
It was built in 1571 and 1572 by Mimar Sinan, the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire, for one of its most powerful men, the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, and his wife Esmahan Sultan, a daughter of Sultan Selim the Second. Sokollu was born to a Christian family in Bosnia, taken as a boy through the devşirme levy, and rose to serve three sultans as grand vizier.
Step inside and the walls glow. The İznik tiles here, turquoise and cobalt and a deep tomato red, are counted among the finest of the late sixteenth century, the golden age of İznik. Sinan was given a steep and cramped plot, and still he made the interior feel generous, light and calm. In a city of monumental mosques, this one wins people over by its proportions, not its size.
Look carefully above the entrance, at the prayer niche and at the pulpit. Small black fragments are set into the marble, framed in gold. Tradition says they are pieces of the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca. Nobody can prove it either way, but people have touched them in reverence for centuries.
Sokollu's own end was abrupt. In 1579 a man dressed as a dervish approached him with a petition and stabbed him. The statesman who had held the empire together under three sultans was gone in a moment, and the balance of power at court shifted for good. From the mosque, keep heading downhill towards the flat ground near the sea, and stop at the little park in Kadırga. You are about to walk onto the bottom of a harbour.
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8. Kadırga: The Lost Harbour of Julian and Sophia
Şehsuvar Bey, Kadırga Parkı, 34130 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
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.
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9. Little Hagia Sophia: Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus
Küçük Ayasofya, Küçük Ayasofya Caddesi No:20, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Walk through the quiet garden courtyard, past the small cemetery and the fountain, and stand beneath the modest dome. It feels like a village mosque. But this building is older than Hagia Sophia, and it was ordered by the same man.
It was built between around 527 and 536 by Justinian and the empress Theodora as the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, two Roman soldiers martyred for their faith. Legend says that the young Justinian, accused of plotting against the emperor Anastasius, was saved from execution when the two saints appeared to the emperor in a dream and spoke up for him. The church, so the story goes, was his thank-you.
Look up at the gallery and find the band of carved Greek letters running around the room. It is a long dedication naming Justinian and Theodora, still in place after almost fifteen centuries. The plan is an octagon set inside an irregular square, with a dome on eight piers, and many historians see in it a rehearsal, a smaller experiment with the ideas that came together in Hagia Sophia only a few years later.
Justinian had lived next door, in the Palace of Hormisdas, before he became emperor, and this church was joined to that palace. Around 1500, under Sultan Bayezid the Second, the chief eunuch of the palace, Hüseyin Ağa, converted it into a mosque, and he lies buried in the courtyard. The cells around the courtyard became a medrese, and the old church took the affectionate name Küçük Ayasofya, Little Hagia Sophia.
The railway line just beyond its walls, together with earthquakes, shook the old building for more than a century, and it came close to serious danger before a long restoration finished in 2007. Now walk down to the coastal road and turn left along the old sea walls. A palace is hiding inside them.
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10. Bukoleon Palace: The Emperors' Windows on the Sea
Sultan Ahmet, Kennedy Caddesi, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Walk along the inland side of the busy coastal road and watch the old sea wall beside you until three great marble window frames appear, with a gateway and broken arches, open to the sky. Behind them there is nothing but bushes and pigeons. That is what remains of the Bukoleon, the seaside palace of the Byzantine emperors.
The name comes from a sculpture that once stood at its private harbour: a bull fighting a lion, bous and leon in Greek. The Great Palace spread over the whole slope from Hagia Sophia down to the water, and here the emperor could step straight from his rooms onto his boats. The sea itself came right up to these walls. The road you are walking on was built on land reclaimed in the twentieth century.
On a winter night in 969, the emperor Nikephoros the Second Phokas was murdered in his bedchamber in this palace. The chroniclers say the conspirators came by boat in a snowstorm and were hauled up the wall in a basket, and that the empress Theophano was in on the plot. The man who struck the blow, the general John Tzimiskes, was her lover, and he became the next emperor.
In 1204 the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade took this palace without a fight, and the knights who entered its treasure rooms wrote about them with open astonishment. In the 1870s the new railway line along the coast cut through what was left of the palace grounds, and the coastal road did the rest.
Look at the stone brackets that once held a balcony out over the water, and imagine an emperor looking across the Sea of Marmara to the hills of Asia. Restoration work has been going on here in recent years, and archaeologists keep finding more of the palace behind the wall. Now cross back inland and climb the lanes uphill to the Arasta Bazaar, where the palace floor itself has survived.
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11. Great Palace Mosaic Museum & the Arasta Bazaar
Sultan Ahmet, Torun Sokağı, Arasta Çarşısı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
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.
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12. The Blue Mosque: Sultanahmet Camii Facing Hagia Sophia
Sultan Ahmet, Atmeydanı Caddesi No:7, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye
Come into the courtyard and stand under its arcades, then turn to see the cascade of domes and half-domes and six slender minarets rising above you. This is Sultanahmet Camii, which the world calls the Blue Mosque, and it stands on top of the Great Palace you have been circling all along.
Sultan Ahmed the First was only nineteen when work began in 1609, with his architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, a pupil of Sinan. Sedefkâr means the mother-of-pearl inlayer, because that was the craft he started in, and you can still see his patience in the inlaid doors and window shutters. It was finished in 1616, and the sultan died the following year, aged twenty-seven. His tomb stands at the corner of the complex, facing the old Hippodrome.
Why six minarets? The story goes that the sultan asked for golden minarets, altın, and the architect heard altı, six. It is almost certainly a legend, but six minarets did cause a stir, because the great mosque in Mecca had as many, and tradition says another one was added there so that Mecca would stay unrivalled.
Inside, more than twenty thousand İznik tiles, with tulips, carnations and cypress trees, and the painted decoration of the domes give the mosque its blue name. It was restored over several years and fully reopened in 2023. Remember, it is a working mosque, and five times a day the city's oldest rhythm takes over this square.
Now walk out to the gardens between the two great domes, with Hagia Sophia ahead of you and the Blue Mosque behind. The architect of this mosque was answering a church more than a thousand years older, and beneath both of them lie the cisterns, the racetrack, the harbour and the palace you have walked through today. Byzantium did not simply vanish in 1453. It went underground... and it is still holding the city up.