Date: Jan 24, 2010 - 23:12
Phoibe, I think most of the restoration work was done in the 1990's, and it was most heavily concentrated in the stretch of the walls north of the Sea of Marmara, and then again north of the Yedikule (Castle of the Seven Towers) -- in all, probably the southern third of the wall. What I've heard is that a lot of the restoration work was done shoddily, and when a relatively powerful earthquake came along a few years back, much of the "restored" and rebuilt portions collapsed pretty completely, while the battered, unrestored sections continued standing tall and proud, having shucked off the "restorations" like an unwanted overcoat. Any future restorations will apparently be done more carefully. I'm sure they'll never try and restore the whole length of the walls. Doubtless, it's helpful for many tourists to be able to see a restored section to really be able to visualize the walls as they once were (although a lot of the more southern sections were always pretty well-preserved). But the pictures I've seen of some of the restored sections of the walls have an overly clean, excessively neat, Disneyland quality about them -- a problem that likewise characterizes much of the "restoration" work done in the old Crusader city of Rhodes when the Italians ruled the island back in the 1920's and 1930's. Moreover, even aside from the romantic aspect that ruins can possess, there was something very moving to me to see the sheer devastation of the towers and sections of wall stretching down to the valley of the Lycus River from the hill by the Top Kapi Gate. These towers are in such terrible shape because they were pounded into rubble during the Ottoman sieges of 1422 and 1453. Seeing their devastation gives you a very strong sense of how desperate and hopeless the defenders must have felt in those final days leading up to May 29, 1453, as they struggled to keep enough of a barrier in place along that section to keep the massed hordes of the Ottoman army out. If you restored more than just the occasional tower along that stretch, you would totally lose that feeling. Thanks for your post about Justinian with the old photos, by the way. You might enjoy looking at my photo set on Flickr of the Haghia Sophia today.