New Rome

Listen for a moment. Seagulls call above the rooftops, a tram bell rings, and somewhere a call to prayer rises over the traffic. Under your feet the pavement is worn smooth, and under that pavement lies another city. Long before this district was called Fatih, these hills held a capital whose rulers gave it a bold name. They called it New Rome.

The story begins with an older town. Greek settlers founded Byzantium on this point of land, where Europe faces Asia across the Bosphorus strait. The site was a natural fortress. Water protects it on three sides. To the north lies the deep harbour called the Golden Horn. To the south lies the Sea of Marmara. Anyone who held this point could control the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

In the early fourth century, the Roman emperor Constantine saw the value of this position. He rebuilt and enlarged the old town, and in the year 330 he dedicated it as a new imperial capital. Its official name was Nova Roma, which means New Rome. The name that lasted, though, honoured the emperor himself... Constantinople, the city of Constantine.

Constantine did not plan a copy in stone of the old capital on the Tiber. He wanted a Rome for a new age, and he gave it the symbols of power. There was a senate, a great forum, a palace and a racecourse. Later writers liked to point out that this peninsula, like Rome, has seven hills. Several of the great mosques you see today stand on those same summits.

Here is the first surprise. The name New Rome is not only a thing of the past. In 381 a church council met in this city and declared that its bishop should rank in honour just after the bishop of Rome, because this city was New Rome. That title still survives. The Ecumenical Patriarch, a senior leader of the Orthodox Christian world, is formally called Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome. His seat is in the Fener neighbourhood, inside this same Fatih district.

Traces of Constantine's city are close at hand if you know where to look. On the main avenue near Çemberlitaş stands a tall, dark column of reddish-purple stone called porphyry. Emperors prized porphyry as an imperial stone. This is the Column of Constantine, and it once stood at the centre of his forum. The Turkish name means roughly the hooped stone, because metal rings hold the damaged drums of the column together.

Walk toward the open square beside the Blue Mosque and you enter the space of the old Hippodrome. Crowds once filled this long arena to watch chariot races, and fans of the rival teams sometimes fought in the streets. The racecourse is gone. Its central line of monuments remains. An Egyptian obelisk stands on a carved marble base. Nearby rises the twisted bronze stump of the Serpentine Column, brought here from the Greek sanctuary at Delphi.

The second surprise is easy to walk past. Near the entrance to the Basilica Cistern stands a small, battered fragment of stone. This is believed to be part of the Milion, the zero-mile marker of the empire. Distances to cities across the Roman world were measured from this point. Most visitors pass it on the way to somewhere else, yet it was once the place where the whole road network began.

Below ground, the city kept its water in great cisterns. The Basilica Cistern was built in the sixth century under the emperor Justinian. Rows of columns rise out of shallow water in the half-light, and the air is cool and damp. Many of the columns were reused from older buildings. Two famous Medusa heads lie at the bases of columns, one on its side and one upside down. No one knows for sure why they were placed that way.

To the west, the land boundary of New Rome was the great line of walls built in the fifth century under Theodosius the Second. These defences stretch across the peninsula from the Marmara shore to the Golden Horn. Ditches, outer walls and inner walls with towers protected the city for about a thousand years. In many places the brick and stone bands still stand, and you can walk beside them.

In 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Second captured the city after a long siege. He became known as Fatih, which means the Conqueror, and this district carries his title. Mehmed built his own mosque on one of the seven hills, on the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles. That church had been the burial place of Constantine and many later emperors. So the founder of New Rome and the conqueror of the city are linked to the same hilltop.

The Ottomans did not erase the idea of Rome. Their sultans sometimes used titles that claimed the Roman inheritance, and the city stayed an imperial capital for centuries more. Byzantine churches became mosques. Roman columns stood in Ottoman courtyards. Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Turkish communities shared these streets. The layers did not replace each other neatly. They pressed together, one on top of another.

That is why this district can feel like a single long sentence written in many languages. A shop sells simit, the ring-shaped sesame bread, beside a wall laid in Roman brick. A courtyard fountain stands on ground once owned by an emperor. Look at any old wall here and you may see thin red bricks between rows of stone. That banded pattern is a common mark of Byzantine building work.

So take a slow breath before you move on. The traffic, the gulls and the voices around you belong to a living city, not a museum. Yet the same water still frames these hills, and the same narrow point of land still faces Asia. As you walk away, watch the ground and the lower courses of the walls. New Rome is still here, a few steps down, under the street you are standing on.