Today I decided to go find and explore the walls of Constantinople, driven by the rich history and the important role they played in the defense of the city. The walls, in their current form, have been in existence since the city of Constantinople was founded by the emperor Constantine in the 4th century.  Theodosius added a double wall in the 5th century which was what I was going to find.  There were walls before the Romans arrived, but those had been destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again.  The current walls are remnants of the structures that Constantine initiated (although these too have seen destruction, rebuilding and restoration over the last 15 centuries). The walls the Romans built were fairly robust and impregnable.  It took the destructive power of cannons, a novelty introduced by the Ottomans when they attacked the city in the mid-1400’s, to weaken the walls enough that the city eventually surrendered.  (It did not help that the Princes of Europe – French, English, Spanish and Frank- were all feuding with each other and the Pope at the time, thus ignoring the urgent warnings about the approaching onslaught of the Turks.  Constantinople was kind of on its own…..)

The walls formed an arc that started in the south at the Sea of Marmara and headed north then swung east towards the eastern shore of the Golden Horn. The original length was slightly over 7.5km but a portion of the wall on the eastern side has been removed to make way for neighborhoods and homes, so I was not going to be able to trace the whole wall. I wanted to see as much of it as I could so I had a long day of walking in front of me regardless.  There is a modern four-lane street that follows the path of the walls, called 10 Yil Cd., so using that information and the tram map I figured out I could take the tram to somewhere near the north side of the wall.  I hopped on the tram, easily found the wall when I got off at the right stop (its big-hard to miss) and headed north along a street that followed abutted right against the inner wall.  I had read that seven gates still existed and my goal was to find all of them.

Road north along the inner wall that I followed for a while. It was not always easy to follow the inner wall.

The inside of the inner walls did not always have an adjacent street so I was unable to follow it the whole way inside. In addition, there was some heavy construction occurring on the southern portion of the wall and I had to avoid that as well.  I did make it to the northern most gate but ran out of steam in the afternoon and did not make it to the southern-most gate near the Sea of Marmara.

The main wall, according to both Wikipedia and the very helpful signage along the way, had a width of 4.8m and height of 11-14m, depending on where you were on the wall.  There were towers at intervals of 50-75m based on changes in topography, with a total of 96 towers originally. The outer walls were about 13m in front of the main walls, 4m at the base and also populated with towers at regular intervals.  In front of the outer walls was a moat (big debate on whether there was ever any water in it) that was 17.5m wide and an average of 14m deep.  Seriously formidable and protected the city for over a millennium!

First gate I ran into heading north from the tram stop: The Gate of St. Romanus, so-called because of a nearby church.

Next gate going north: The 5th Military gate. Apparently there were military and civilian gates.

After finding the northern most gate, I exited the wall and started walking down the outside of the wall along 10 Yil Cd, which was a very busy road. I was pretty much the only tourist wandering around and I do not know if that is because no one else is interested in looking at walls, or if it was far enough away from the center of the big tourist draws (Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia etc..) that no one thought to explore them.  Either way, it was me and the locals, who were mainly there waiting for buses at the numerous bus stops I passed.  After a an hour and a half of walking I had made it back to near the tram stop and I detoured into the park adjacent to the outside of the walls to visit the Panorama 1453 History Museum, which documented and described the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. As I had recently read a history book about the late 1400s/early 1500s, it was super interesting to hear the story and compare with what I remembered from the book.

Northern most gate: The Gate of Charisius. It was a big gate!

After the brief break at the museum I headed outside and continued my way south along the outside of the outer wall until I got to my sixth gate of the day.  There was one more, further south, but I was hot and tired and decide to call it a day (still having a 35 minute walk to the tram line). My walk back took me through parts of the old city where people lived, not the tourist area. A couple of observations:

1)        If you like cats, Istanbul is your kind of place!  There are stray cats everywhere.  I cannot call them feral because people feed them and I even saw a few “cat houses” sitting by a tree.  I dubbed them “community cats” and they seem to have the run of the city.  They are constantly underfoot everywhere I go. (I even saw one walking across the carpet in the Hagia Sofia, where no tourist is allowed to go- so WHO is really running the city- the people or the cats?).

2)        There are a lot of men sitting around in coffee shops, talking, smoking, drinking tea or coffee and looking at their phones— all over the place.  Some are older and clearly retired, but many are also younger.  Not sure what the deal is there.

Back to the wall:

The wall was in different states of repair in different places, but most of the time I could pick out the basic geometry.  Some sections clearly have undergone extensive renovation and other areas were more or less a heap of rubble in the shape of a wall. A nice green space lies along the outer wall, perhaps where the moat was, and as I went further south, I noticed that extensive vegetable gardens have been planted.  Several of the gates are used by cars (and were quite busy!) and some remain pedestrian.  There were a few places, mainly near the southern gates, where I could climb the outer wall and get a view. The whole time I was walking along the walls, I was trying to imagine what it would have been like when they were fully functional, with people coming and going, towers manned by guards, alerts occurring that would shut the walls down, defending against attackers… So much history!

Heading south from the tram stop, the next gate: Gate of Rhegion (or Rhesios)

Next one south: Gate of Silivrikapi. This one was hard to get a picture of without getting run over by a car. Lots of traffic coming through (one-way out).

Last gate I got to: Belgrade Gate.

View from on top of the outer walls at the Silivirkapi Gate.

Areas where the walls were in good shape….

And areas where the walls were in not so good shape…. (Something bad happened here)