Istanbul XXVI — A City Built on a Thirsty Peninsula
Istanbul sits on water. The Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara surround it. And yet when Byzantium was founded here, the one thing the site didn't have was fresh water to drink. Everything that came next, the aqueducts, the reservoirs, even some of the neighborhoods you walk through today, grew out of that problem.
Where Do You Find Water for a Capital?
Many great ancient cities grew up beside a river, the way Rome has the Tiber. Byzantium didn't. There was one small stream, the Lykos, known today as the Bayrampaşa Stream, which ran through the city and into the Sea of Marmara, not far from where the first settlement stood at Sarayburnu, the tip of the peninsula. But a small stream, with no guarantee that its water was clean, was never going to be enough for a city that kept growing.
Since the peninsula had no water of its own, it had to be brought in from outside. The effort probably began under the Roman emperor Hadrian (117–138), and every emperor who lived in the city afterward kept building on it.
The most famous result is the aqueduct of Valens. It was presumably built by the emperor Valens, and it carried water across the valley where Atatürk Boulevard runs today, bringing it to an enormous fountain complex in what is now Beyazıt Square. Valens' successors extended the system, tapping springs much farther away in the Belgrade Forest, north of the city, and sending the water in by channel to be stored in cisterns.
You can still see it today. The Ottomans called it the Bozdoğan Aqueduct, and it still strides across the city, now with taxis and delivery vans passing underneath it.
The Reservoirs
A cistern is just a big underground or open-air water tank. Byzantine Constantinople had two kinds. The first were large open-air reservoirs that caught and distributed water, essentially giant artificial lakes. The second were smaller or medium-sized covered cisterns, built to store water for longer periods. (The famous Basilica Cistern, with its forest of columns, is one of the covered ones.)
Even during long sieges, the city apparently didn’t rely on collecting rainwater. The huge reservoirs were most likely fed through a cleverly designed network of channels, which kept water flowing in even when the city was surrounded. The Ottomans took over the whole system, which had been completely renovated under the emperor Andronikos I Komnenos (1183–1185). But they seem to have given up on the open reservoirs, probably because by then the city’s population had shrunk, and it no longer needed them.
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Three of those open reservoirs sat in the upper part of the city, between the walls of Constantine and the walls of Theodosius. Together they held a little over 800,000 cubic meters of water. That's enough to give every resident of fifteenth-century Constantinople 10 liters a day for a full year.
- The Aetius Cistern was the biggest: 85 meters wide, 244 meters long, and almost 15 meters deep. That’s longer than two football pitches placed end to end. It was built in 421 under a high official named Aetius (a prefect, roughly a city governor), right behind the city gate then called Charisios, later the Adrianople Gate. Its job was to collect the water brought in by the Valens Aqueduct.
- The Aspar Cistern was a square pool, 152 meters on each side and 10 meters deep, which supplied the area along the Golden Horn.
- The Mokios Cistern, 170 by 140 meters, was built by the emperor Anastasius (491–518) near a church of the same name. It replaced an earlier cistern, built by the prefect Modestus between 363 and 369, that had supplied the Marmara coast.
From Reservoir to Vegetable Patch
So what happened to these giant pools once nobody needed them? Under the Ottomans, they were drained and turned into vegetable gardens. That’s why they’re still called çukurbostan today, which means "sunken garden."
And today?
The Aetius Cistern lies under the Karagümrük stadium, where football matches are played. The other two are now parks and sports grounds, with basketball courts where water once stood.
Lunch Under a Roman Arch
The aqueduct has one more role in modern Istanbul. It’s one of the city’s iconic views, and the neighborhood around it is home to Kadınlar Pazarı, the "Women’s Market." Today it’s best known for restaurants that serve büryan, a dish from southeastern Turkey, especially the city of Siirt: lamb slow-cooked for hours in a deep pit oven until it’s soft enough to fall off the bone, usually served with flatbread.
The market is nicknamed "Little Siirt," because it became a gathering place for people who migrated to Istanbul from southeastern Turkey. Their restaurants, butchers, and shops selling foods from home clustered here.
In the long shadow of the aqueduct's stone wall, elderly men sit on low stools, drinking tea from a nearby tea stand.
It's a nice thing to see. A water channel built sixteen centuries ago for an emperor's capital is now where people sit down for tea.
Sources
- Yerasimos, Stefanos. Constantinople: Istanbul’s Historical Heritage.
