Turkey Guide
İstanbul
The Hippodrome
Address: Sultanahmet
The arena of the Hippodrome, formerly the cultural focus of the Byzantine Empire, is now the site of a long and narrow municipal park known as At Meydanı, or Square of Horses. It is overshadowed by the Palace of İbrahim Paşa on one side and Sultanahmet Camii on the other, but its historical significance predates that of most other major monuments in İstanbul.
The large open space would now be little more than a pleasant respite from the surrounding hubbub if interest were not aroused by the several monuments strewn randomly along its length. At the south end of the park are three survivors of the array of obelisks, columns and statues that originally adorned the spina, the raised central axis of the arena, around which chariots raced. Northernmost of these is the Egyptian Obelisk, originally 60m tall, though only the upper third survived shipment from Egypt in the fourth century. The obelisk was commissioned to commemorate the campaigns of Thutmos III in Egypt during the sixteenth century BC, but the scenes on its base commemorate its erection in Constantinople under the direction of Theodosius I. Among the figures depicted are dancing maidens with musicians, Theodosius and his family watching a chariot race (south side) and a group of captives kneeling to pay homage to Theodosius (west side).
The Serpentine Column comes from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where it was dedicated to the god by the 31 Greek cities that defeated the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC. The column was brought to Constantinople by Constantine the Great. The three intertwining bronze serpents originally had heads, which splayed out in three directions from the column itself. The jaw of one of the serpents was lopped off by Mehmet the Conqueror on his arrival in Constantinople as an act of defiance against such symbols of idolatry and the remaining heads were probably removed in an act of vandalism at the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, one of the heads is on display in the "İstanbul through the Ages" exhibit at the Archeology Museum.
The third ancient monument on the spina is a huge lump of masonry, a 32-metre-high column of little or no decorative or practical worth. The emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus was presumably of this opinion in the tenth century, since he restored the pillar and sheathed it in gold-plated bronze. This ornamentation was taken and melted down by the Crusaders during the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. The origins of this so-called Column of Constantine are uncertain, but an inscription records that it was already decayed when Constantine restored it.