Aetius cistern

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Map of the Byzantine Constantinople. The cistern was in the northern part of the city, southeast of the Charisius gate.

The cistern of Aetius ( Greek ἡ Κινστέρνη τοῦ Ἄετίου , Turkish Aetios Sarnıcı ) was one of the largest open cisterns in Byzantine Constantinople. In Ottoman times the place was called Çukurbostan ( Eng . Sunken Garden ). In 1928 the Karagümrük Stadium (also Vefa Stadium ) was built here.

location

The cistern was located in today's Karagümrük district in Istanbul's Fatih district on Fevzi Paşa Caddesi . At the time of Constantinople, the cistern was located within the Theodosian land wall around 300 meters southeast of the Charisius Gate ( Edirnekapı in Turkish ) in the XIV region of the city. The structure was at the top of the valley that separated the fifth and sixth hills of Constantinople.

history

The Karagümrük Stadium from the west. Behind the trees you can see the remains of the walls of the cistern.

Although the cistern is said to have been built by the Roman Emperor Valens in the 4th century, according to a late tradition , it is assumed today that it was built in 421 by the praefectus urbi Aetios ( Latin Aëtius ) under Emperor Theodosius II . The cistern has long been confused with the cistern of a patrician Bonus or the cistern of the Aspar. It has only recently been possible to reliably identify it. The large water reservoir ran parallel to the northern junction of the large main street Mese , which connected the Charisios gate with the center of the city and led past the Apostle Church . The cistern was filled via the main water supply of the Valens aqueduct . Due to its huge size, the cistern was often used as a landmark to identify other buildings.

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the French explorer Pierre Gilles said that the reservoir was empty by 1540 and was no longer used. In the time of the Ottoman Empire, the place was called Çukurbostan ( sunken garden ) and was probably used for growing vegetables.

A football stadium was built here in the 1920s, where Vefa SK , today Fatih Karagümrük SK , has played its home games in the third-highest Turkish league since 1928 .

Identification problems

Attempts to identify the location of the Aetius cistern began late. The cistern was first identified with a cistern that was located near the Porphyrogennetos Palace ( Turkish Tekfur Sarayı ) and is no longer visible today, then with a cistern in the courtyard of the small Kefeli mosque and finally with the vaulted cistern southeast of the Çukurbostan at Charisius Gate, also known as Zina Yokusu Bodrumi . The key to the final identification of the place lay in the information that the cistern of Aetius was near the Prodromos monastery, since its location in the valley between the fifth and sixth hill is considered safe.

description

The rectangular cistern had the enormous dimensions of 244 meters long and 85 meters wide and a surface of more than 20,700 m². It was between 13 and 15 meters deep. The capacity was between 250,000 and 300,000 liters of water. The walls were up to 5.20 meters thick and have been partially preserved. They were built using the Roman masonry technique opus listatum , by alternating four rows of bricks with ten rows of stones, thus developing a banded pattern that resembles that of the Aspar cistern. It has been hypothesized that this reservoir was used to supply water to the moat of the city walls, but it is more plausible that it was a central reservoir from which the water was distributed around the city.

literature

  • James Crow, Jonathan Bardill, Richard Andrew Bayliss: The Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople . In: Journal of Roman studies , Volume 11, 2008, pp. 129-131

Web links

Commons : Cistern of Aetius  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Semavi Eyice : Istanbul. Petite Guide a travers les Monuments Byzantins et Turcs . Istanbul Matbaası, Istanbul 1955, p. 71
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Wolfgang Müller-Wiener : Pictorial dictionary on the topography of Istanbul: Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, Istanbul up to the beginning of the 17th century . Wasmuth, Tübingen 1977, ISBN 978-3-8030-1022-3 , p. 278
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Raymond Janin : Constantinople Byzantine . Institut Français d'Etudes Byzantines, Paris 1964, p. 203
  4. ^ A b c Raymond Janin : Constantinople Byzantine . Institut Français d'Etudes Byzantines, Paris 1964, p. 204
  5. ↑ Vefa Stadı - İstanbul , Europlan, European Football Magazine, accessed on May 8, 2019
  6. ↑ Neslihan Asutay-Effenberger : The Monastery of Ioannes Prodromos τής Пέτρας in Constantinople and its relationship to Odalar and Kasım Ağa Camii . In: Millennium. Yearbook on culture and history of the first millennium AD Volume 5, 2008, pp. 299–326
  7. ^ Michael Whitby : The long walls of Constantinople . Byzantion, Vol. 55, No. 2 (1985), pp. 560-583, here p. 577
  8. ^ Ernest Mamboury : The Tourists' Istanbul . Çituri Biraderler Basımevi, Istanbul 1953, p. 325

Coordinates: 41 ° 1 ′ 40 ″  N , 28 ° 56 ′ 21 ″  E