The Great Palace Mosaic Museum is a single sixth-century floor, all that survives of the imperial palace that once sprawled from the Hippodrome down to the sea. You walk a raised walkway above the ancient level and look down as the pavement unrolls scene by scene. The subject is startling: no saints and no crosses, but hunters spearing tigers, an elephant gripping a lion in its trunk, children riding camels, shepherds milking goats. A dense acanthus border frames it all, with faces and masks peering out of the leaves.
The floor carpeted a colonnaded courtyard and was rediscovered only when archaeologists dug beneath a poor quarter in the 1930s. Its cubes are so small that from a few steps back the images read like brushstrokes; limestone, glass and terracotta still hold their colour after some fifteen centuries. The room stays quiet, often near-empty, though the Blue Mosque and the Arasta Bazaar press in just outside. Nothing else of the vanished palace speaks this clearly.