Basilica Cistern

The Basilica Cistern is a drowned forest of stone under the streets of Istanbul's old city. Emperor Justinian I had it built in the 6th century on the site of a great Roman-era basilica — hence its name; in Turkish it is Yerebatan Sarnıcı or Yerebatan Sarayı, the "sunken palace". The vault, about 138 by 65 m, rests on 336 marble columns, each about 9 m high, set in twelve rows of twenty-eight and spaced five metres apart. When full, the reservoir held up to 80,000 m³ of water, brought some 19 km from the Belgrad Forest north of the city along a chain of aqueducts that included the Valens Aqueduct.

The columns did not come from one quarry or one workshop. Most were salvaged from older buildings across the empire, which is why Ionic and Corinthian capitals stand side by side and why some shafts are smooth while others are carved. One column is covered in a pattern often described as a hen's eye, with slanting branches and teardrops. In the northwest corner, two column bases rest on carved heads of Medusa — one lying on its side, the other upside down. Nobody knows where they came from or why they were placed that way, and the uncertainty is part of their fascination.

After the Ottoman conquest the cistern slipped out of sight, though not out of use: houses stood over it, and their owners drew water — and, it was said, caught fish — through holes in their basement floors. The French scholar Petrus Gyllius, studying the antiquities of Constantinople in the 1540s, heard these stories, found his way down and was rowed between the columns, watching fish in the water beneath the boat. Today the water is shallow, the walkways have been rebuilt in major restorations in the 1980s and in 2020–2022, and soft lighting picks out the columns as they recede into the dark. The cistern has appeared on screen in the James Bond film From Russia with Love (1963) and plays a role in Dan Brown's novel Inferno.

Getting there

The cistern is in the Sultanahmet quarter, across the street from Hagia Sophia and about 1.2 km from Eminönü on the Golden Horn. The simplest approach is the T1 Kabataş–Bağcılar tram to the Sultanahmet stop, a walk of two to three minutes. The nearest airport is Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen (SAW) on the Asian side, about 30 km away.