The fate of Byzantine-era monuments in Istanbul, Turkey – formerly the Byzantine capital city Constantinople – have been the subject of international debate, as Turkey’s government is slowly paving over Istanbul’s broader Byzantine history with selective and low-grade restoration works, according to some historians.
Today’s Istanbul would be a very different city if it weren’t for the Byzantines. Before it became the capital of the Christian, Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire in the fourth century AD, the Greek colony known as Byzantium was a small but well-situated trading port on the shores of the Bosporus.
Renamed Constantinople, it served as the center of power for an empire that endured for more than a millennium, until the city was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
At its peak, the Byzantine Empire commanded territory extending from the Balkans to North Africa, and it played a crucial role in connecting Christian and Islamic civilizations and conserving ancient Greek and Roman culture to the present day.
European travelers to the Byzantine capital in the 12th century described palaces adorned with jewels, gold, and marble statues, but a visitor today requires a keen eye and a lot of imagination to try and grasp the magnificence of the pre-Ottoman city.
“You have to work hard at understanding Byzantine Istanbul because so much is hidden or misrepresented,” Veronica Kalas, an independent historian specializing in the art and architecture of the Byzantine Empire, told National Geographic. “There are all these bits and pieces, but how they fit together doesn’t reveal itself easily,” she added.
Sections of the huge system of aqueducts and cisterns that provided Constantinople with water can be found in parking lots and along roadways, lining the sides of soccer stadiums and playgrounds, and sitting beneath carpet shops and hotels.
A faded inscription under the eaves of a building may also be seen, or a chunk of carved marble half-covered by weeds may be the only visible hint of a specific structure’s Byzantine past. These hidden layers, however, belie long-lasting influence.
Examples of Byzantine Culture from Constantinople Drowned Out in Istanbul
The site of the Hippodrome, where Byzantine crowds gathered and cheered the brave charioteers and later Ottoman soldiers and horses trained for war, is now a quiet park. The grand Fatih Mosque, named for the sultan who conquered Istanbul for the Ottomans, was constructed over the site where Byzantine emperors were buried hundreds of years earlier. The roads of the Sultanahmet tourist region are still aligned with the Byzantine street plan.
There are also smaller Byzantine continuities in daily life though, including much of Istanbul’s street food and its famed meyhane culture of boozy nights sharing small plates of food in tavern-like restaurants.
“Turkey’s Byzantine heritage is an emotional matter that also gets projected onto contemporary politics due to its association with the idea of Ottoman conquest,” archaeologist Alessandra Ricci, a professor at Istanbul’s Koç University, told National Geographic.
Many Orthodox Christian communities, the Greek one in particular, still feel a connection to the Eastern Christian capital of Constantinople. Despite Greece and Turkey being neighbors and Nato allies, the countries are also frequent adversaries, and “as a result, many Turks have difficulty embedding this heritage in their cultural understanding of the city,” according to Ricci.
Evidence of this lies in the lack of Byzantine objects on display at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, with the city also failing to build a planned museum to house artifacts from 37 Byzantine shipwrecks discovered in 2005 during the construction of a subway station.
Some scholars highlight the erasure of Byzantine history during restoration work at various churches-turned-mosques. A central example is the former Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, a significant monastic center built in the sixth century and today known as the Little Hagia Sophia Mosque.
“Too many of Istanbul’s Byzantine monuments, like Küçük Aya Sofya, have been overly restored within an inch of their lives, with no serious analysis or documentation done of what is discovered during the restoration process,” Robert Ousterhout, a professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania told National Geographic. “So we end up with a new mosque but don’t learn anything new about the building’s history.”
The fortified walls of Istanbul – some 13 miles long – that once formed the boundaries of Byzantine Constantinople, keeping it safe from both land and sea attacks, are also a point of tension. Restoration work carried out in the 1980s and 1990s was agreed by preservationists to be a poor-quality reconstruction misaligned with the walls’ initial texture and materials.
The reopening of Tekfur Sarayi in 2019, a Byzantine palace embedded in the inland section of the walls, has been criticized for highlighting the building’s years as an Ottoman ceramics factory, rather than for its multifaceted history.
In 2020, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality began a new effort to protect and preserve the walls that, officials said, would become more sensitive than those carried out in the past.
The Istanbul municipality authorities claim not to differentiate between Byzantine or Ottoman or the Turkish Republic when it comes to Istanbul’s cultural heritage, but the municipality does not have the final say when it comes to Istanbul’s monuments.
President Erdogan’s central government Culture and Tourism Ministry has the final say, and national government and municipality have clashed many times over the direction of Istanbul’s Byzantine cultural heritage.
