Column of Constantine (Çemberlitaş)

Landmark · ÇemberlitaşIstanbul,Türkiye

A thirty-five-metre porphyry shaft on Istanbul's old imperial avenue, cracked, burnt and iron-hooped, standing where the city was founded in 330.

The Column of Constantine is a scarred stone shaft standing on Divan Yolu, the old imperial avenue, and it has held this spot since the city's first day in 330. You look up some thirty-five metres of deep-purple porphyry drums, cracked by earthquakes, blackened by fire and clamped together with iron hoops. The fires gave it the English name Burnt Column; the hoops gave it the Turkish one, Çemberlitaş, the hooped stone. It once stood at the centre of Constantine's round forum, on the Mese, the processional spine of the city. The centuries have not been kind, and that is much of its power: what you see is a monument mended by two empires and still standing. A gilded statue of Constantine crowned it until a gale brought it down nine centuries ago, killing passers-by; a cross later took its place, and that too came down. The column now rises from a walled Ottoman base, trams pass at its foot, and most of the city hurries by without looking up.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The top is a break, not a finish — the shaft ends bluntly where a gilded emperor stood, then a cross, then nothing; you are looking at a column missing its crown.
The street has risen around it — Byzantine ground lies a couple of metres below today's pavement, so you are seeing the column short; it once stood on a stepped platform at the centre of a round plaza.
It is a stack, not one stone — the shaft is built of separate porphyry drums set one on another, and the joints run visibly all the way up.

Things to do

1
Read the scars from the railing
Stand at the railing and look straight up the shaft. The damage is the point: earthquake cracks running through the drums, and the black of old fire across the lower stone. Come late in the day and look low — raking light separates the burn from the purple, so the monument's oldest wounds stand out just before the rooftops of Divan Yolu take the light away.
2
Walk the old imperial avenue
Step onto the short run of Divan Yolu beside the column and follow it a little way. This was the Mese, Byzantium's great ceremonial avenue. Imagine coronation processions passing this exact pillar on their way between Hagia Sophia and the Golden Gate, the column one of the avenue's grandest markers.
3
Frame Constantine against the Ottoman dome
Move to the corner by Çemberlitaş Hamamı and line up the column with the bathhouse's lead dome behind it. In a single view you hold Constantine's founding column and Sinan's sixteenth-century bathhouse, more than twelve centuries apart, still sharing one small square.