Byzantium: the back story

About Byzantium: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Istanbul Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Greek colonists from Megara founded Byzantium in the 7th century BC on the point where the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara meet, where Topkapı Palace stands today. Its harbour, its fish and its control of the strait made it rich for a thousand years.

A city on the strait

Few places on earth have a site like this: a triangle of land with water on three sides, the Golden Horn as a deep natural harbour, and the Bosphorus carrying every ship between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Whoever held the point held the strait.

Byzas and the oracle

According to tradition, the city was founded by Byzas of Megara, who had asked the oracle at Delphi where to settle and was told to build “opposite the land of the blind”. The colonists of Chalcedon, today’s Kadıköy, had settled on the Asian shore a few years earlier, and seemed blind to have missed the far better site across the water.

Legend says Byzantium was founded by Byzas, a Greek from Megara, in the 7th century BC.

Roman Byzantium

Byzantium became part of the Roman world. After the city took the losing side in a civil war, Emperor Septimius Severus besieged and sacked it in AD 196, then rebuilt it with new walls, baths and the beginnings of the Hippodrome, whose outline you can still trace in Sultanahmet Square.

What you can see today

Little of Greek Byzantium survives above ground, but the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, on the slope below Topkapı, hold finds from the ancient city, and the Hippodrome and the acropolis point at Sarayburnu, now Gülhane Park, follow the lines of the ancient town.

Our advice: stand at the tip of Sarayburnu, by Gülhane Park, and look at the three waters meeting; then visit the Archaeology Museums to see what the ancient city left behind. It explains, better than any book, why this site became the capital of two empires.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Byzantium: the back story before you go.