Arcadius forum

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Map of the Byzantine Constantinople

The Arcadius Forum ( Latin Forum Arcadii , Greek Φόρος τοῦ Ἀρκαδίου ) was a forum in Byzantine Constantinople (now Istanbul ).

location

The Arcadius Forum was built in the Xerolophos region at the foot of the seventh hill of Constantinople in region XII and was the westernmost forum along the southwest axis of the main Mese street and the last forum before the Theodosian Wall and the Golden Gate after the Theodosius Forum , the Forum of Constantine , the Forum Bovis and the Amastrianum . Presumably the place was used for ceremonial purposes. Nothing remains of the square today. Only the base of the column still stands tightly between two houses on Haseki Kadın Sokak in the Cerrahpaşa district in the Fatih district of Istanbul .

history

The Arcadius Forum was built in 403 by the Byzantine emperor Arcadius and, after his early death, completed by his son Theodosius II in 421.

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the forum was converted into a wooden bazaar, the Avrat Pazarı or Women's Bazaar, which was falsely equated with a slave market near Nur-u Osmaniye where female slaves were for sale. However, Cariye were offered here who , as concubines, had a different legal position than slaves. The practice was banned in 1847 under Mustafa Reşid Pascha .

View over Constantinople by Melchior Lorck (1559). The Arcadius Column can be seen on the left.

The statue was damaged by an earthquake in 542 and a lightning strike in 549. An earthquake in 740 destroyed the statue because it fell from the pillar. The damaged column was secured with iron rings and had to be demolished in 1715 because it threatened to fall on the neighboring houses. Today there are only remains of the column base and plinth and some fragments of the relief that are on display in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum .

architecture

The Arcadius Column stood in the center of the square. The shaft of the column was adorned with a spiral in relief, which celebrated the military triumphs of the emperor. Members of the imperial family, military personnel and high administrative officials, as well as Christian motifs, are depicted on the base. On the more than 50 meter high column was an equestrian statue of Arcadius that his son and successor Theodosius II had installed in 421 . A small chamber was housed in the approximately four-meter-high base made of large marble blocks, which served as the entrance to the spiral staircase in the column. The entrance was on the unadorned north side. The shaft of the column itself was about 3.6 meters thick and between 36 and 40 meters high. The spiral staircase inside had 233 steps and was lit by 56 windows.

Halls and exedra could have stood around the square .

literature

  • Gabriel Millet: Le forum d'Arcadius, la dénomination, les statues . Memorial Louis Petit. Bucharest 1948, pp. 361-365

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nevra Necipoglu; Byzantine Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life . Brill, Leiden 2001, p. 31
  2. ^ Cyril Mango : The Triumphal Way of Constantinople and the Golden Gate . In: Dumbarton Oaks Papers . Vol. 54 (2000), p. 179
  3. ^ Ine Jacobs: The creation of the late antique city: Constantinople and Asia Minor during the 'Theodosian Renaissance' . In: Byzantion . Vol. 82 (2012), pp. 137, 143
  4. ↑ Burcu Ozguven: A marketplace in the Ottoman Empire: Avrat Pazari and its surroundings. In: Kadin , Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001, p. 431
  5. ↑ a b Friedrich Wilhelm Unger: About the four colossal columns in Constantinople . In: Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft , Volume 2, De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 1968, p. 122
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Müller-Wiener : Pictorial dictionary on the topography of Istanbul. Byzantium - Constantinupolis - Isatnbul until the beginning of the 17th century . Wasmuth, Tübingen 1977, p. 253
  7. ^ Sarah Bassett: The Topography of Triumph in Late-Antique Constantinople . In: Fabian von Goldbeck, Johannes Wienand (Ed.): The Roman Triumph in Principle and Late Antiquity . De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, pp. 536–539
  8. ^ Sarah Bassett: The Topography of Triumph in Late-Antique Constantinople . In: Fabian von Goldbeck, Johannes Wienand (Ed.): The Roman Triumph in Principle and Late Antiquity . De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, p. 538

Coordinates: 41 ° 0 ′ 27.7 "  N , 28 ° 56 ′ 34.8"  E