Thanks for reading this week’s Dispatches from Gauteng. This week’s edition, about Istanbul, will be the first in a short series about cities that have been cities in for thousands of years.
Istanbul doesn’t feel ancient.
It certainly feels old, at least in the oldest parts of the city, but it feels more like an 18th and 19th century city built on top of an early-modern city.
Sure, you can walk down a street of stores selling lights, turn the corner and come to a medieval tower. There are places where medieval walls are flanked by highways and highrises.
But you could forget that, around the year 500, this was the world’s largest city.
Istanbul is still one of the world’s largest cities, home to over 15 million people. It is built on a scale that is difficult to conceptualize, it is dense and sprawling at the same time.
Modern buildings rise up between 20th century brutalist apartments, built on top of a grand Ottoman capital, built on top of a grand Byzantine capital, built on top of a Roman outpost, built on top of a Greek colony built on top of thousands of years of settlement.
It is a city that straddles two continents both physically and metaphorically.
I cross the Galata bridge to Sultanahmet, from an old city to an older city, to the neighbourhood where both the Ottoman Sultans and the Byzantine Emperors had their palaces.
I want to find the remnants of old Constantinople, to find what remains of the Byzantine city.
The signs of the Ottoman Turks are everywhere, there are grand mosques on every hill, there is the Grand Bazar with its tiles fit for a royal palace.
Some of the remains are more obvious: the Hagia Sophia, built as a cathedral 1,500 years ago, repurposed as a mosque around 1,000 years later.
500 hundred years on, it is still a mosque – one with a particularly beautiful call to prayer – but inside, if you look up from a large sign in Arabic cursive, you can see a mosaic of Christ and the Virgin looking down.
Up above, on a balcony looking down at the spot where first Byzantine emperors were crowned and where later imams would preach, there is a piece of Viking graffiti; a few lines of runic writing carved in a marble railing. It is hard to make out, harder to read. They say no one knows exactly what it says, perhaps it’s a name, perhaps something else.
Who was this Viking, I wonder, what was he doing doing here? Was he a member of the Varangian Guard? Was he bored when he carved his name? Was he at church or a coronation? What would he think if he knew that this cathedral would become a mosque and 1,000 years later tourists would wonder about an idle carving he made with the same amount of thought that you had when you carved your name in a desk in elementary school.
The layers here are what matter, the things built on top of one another.
Where the old hippodrome, the centre of public life in Constantinople for hundreds of years, once stood, a ditch has been dug around the columns that stood within the track, about six feet deep, to show their bases.
After so many centuries of building on building, the ground level has risen.
From there, I take a trolly and a bus to the walls that once marked the limits of the medieval city. It takes about half an hour.
Think about that scale, a medieval city that took at least an hour to walk across, this was a massive place.
There is an old palace built along the walls – walls that were only breached once (the city was also betrayed once, and sacked by crusaders).
Built in the late 1200s, long after the city’s original glory days (of course, a city like this would have more glory days), I hoped there I would find something from an even more mysterious period, the strange medieval empire that grew out of the New Rome.
But like so much, that history has been buried. The museum on the site of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus is dedicated almost entirely to the fact that centuries later, during the Ottoman period, tiles were made on the site.
Walking back, to the Grand Bazar, toward the Hagia Sophia and the old hippodrome, I start to see it, doorways half underground, houses built on top of ancient foundations, arches that once stood tall enough for a man on a horse that now are barely tall enough for a person to walk through.
The old city is here, half buried as life has gone on.