I’d toyed with the idea of going all the way back into Sultanhamet to try and see the Mosaic Museum, but I didn’t want to risk anything going awry and leaving me stranded that far from the airport. So I just rode to the Top Kapi stop (5 stops on the metro + 6 stops on the light rail), which is not to be confused with the palace – its name refers to the Top Kapi Gate in the land walls.

By 8:45 or 8:50 I was getting off the light rail in a large park that extends along north and south along both sides of the Millet Caddesi where it emerges from the city walls here. I followed a sidewalk that led towards the wall, crossing over one of the motorways that runs north and south outside the walls to the west. And then I was walking right along the wall.

I should probably provide an initial note about security for others who might be tempted to explore the land walls. There are sections of the wall, notably in the area of the former Lycus Valley, where guidebooks discourage tourists from walking alone, owing to the danger of robbery from residents of some of the poorer communities nearby. As the Lonely Planet Guide to Istanbul puts its: "Be warned, though, that the walls are in bad condition in many spots and go through less-than-salubrious neighborhoods. Don’t consider doing this walk by yourself – there are packs of dogs outside the municipal dog pound up the hill at the start of the walls at the Marble Tower; and vagrants living in the wall’s cavities along its length who have been known to rob and assault passers-by."

Similarly, the volume The Walls of Constantinople in the Osprey Fortress series orovides the following cautionary remarks: "To the south of the Topkapi Gate the successive underpasses of the motorway render the area adjacent to the wall remote, lonely, and somewhat threatening. . . . In spite of the attentions of the Istanbul government long sections of the wall do not appear to provide personal safety. In some places they provide locations for itinerants, and no tourist would wish to venture near. In other places the walls pass through very unpleasant looking areas of the city, where a visitor is regarded with suspicion. This unfortunately includes some of the best-restored sections of the wall."

So, forewarned is forearmed. As my comments below indicate, I certainly saw evidence of vagrants along the stretch south of the Milet Caddesi, and had one scary moment that underlined my vulnerability along this stretch. Things were better down near the Gate of Rhegium, and along the area by the St. Romanus/Top Kapi Gate, which is part of a more heavily trafficked public park and has been landscaped in an effort to make it more welcoming to tourists.

On the stretch immediately south of the Millet Caddesi, the moat has been completely filled in, and the sidewalk runs right along the lower, outer wall (the protichisma) with its round towers. The massive, square towers of the inner wall overlook you from behind it.

Although you can get close to the wall here, it is hardly a picturesque stretch. Cars roar behind you along the Millet Caddesi, which is six lanes wide at this point. There is also traffic noise from the motorway running through the trench beneath the pedestrian overpass, and gasoline fumes and exhaust vapors waft through the air. Moreover, for better or for worse, the stretch immediately south of the Millet Caddesi seems to have received virtually no maintenance. All sorts of plants and even small trees are still growing out of the walls, evidently continuing to loosen the stones, and there is a fair amount of litter strewn along the path. Vagrants apparently live and camp along the walls, and at one spot (shown in my photographs), an impressive octagonal tower has been badly scorched (and, it appears, damaged) by fire along one side. Another sheared-off fragment of a tower in the outer walls with a postern gate was largely filled up with earth and debris. I was able to clamber up along the remains of the outer wall here, which are about 7 feet high, and make my way north a short distance, but it is impossible to walk much along either the outer or inner walls in this stretch; the best place to do that seems to be down along the more heavily restored southern sections near the Yedikule and the Marmara shore.

While I was making my way along the wall, I saw three men suddenly running towards the wall in my direction. I wondered nervously if I was about to be robbed; with my foot still hurting from the sprain the day before, I couldn’t have run far or fast if that had been necessary. The three men clambered quickly up onto the wall just where I had, but then passed on through an entrance in the inner wall and into the city. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I climbed back down from the wall and continued south. Soon, a restored section of the outer wall came into view, and then there was a lengthy stretch of the inner wall that was restored as well. Green gardens filled up the old moat, and a few gardeners were about, which made me less nervous. The road does run fairly close to the moat here, and although the passing traffic generates noise, it also provides reassurance that there is no need to worry about your security.

I soon came to the Gate of Rhegium, which marked the southern terminus of my walk. It has other names. The Turks knew it as the Melevihane Kapisi, because a tekke of Mevlevi Dervishes, the same ones famous for their swirling performances in Konya, stood outside it in Ottoman times. The Byzantines also called it the "Gate of the Reds," because it was part of a section of the walls built by the Red faction in the Circus, back before it merged into the Greens. It is particularly rich in inscriptions, the texts of which you can find in Van Millingen’s volume about the walls (listed in the references section below). There are inscriptions in both Greek and Latin the commemorate the completion of the walls and gate in 447, when an earlier line of walls was rebuilt after suffering serious damage in an earthquake. They mention the Emperor Theodosius II, of course (you can see this in one of my pictures) and record that the construction of the walls was completed in a period of only two months. On the lintel, another inscription records a restoration during the reign of Justin II (565-78), and mentions by name that Emperor, his wife Sophia, and the eunuch Narses, famous for his successful campaigns against the Ostrogoths and Franks in Italy during the 550's and subsequent service as the Exarch of Ravenna.

Once I turned around at the Gate of Rhegium I walked quickly back to the Millet Caddesi. There was no crosswalk or evident way across it without walking a couple of hundred yards to the left into the park to the Top Kapi light rail station, or perhaps to the right down inside the city. So, given that I was pressed for time, I followed the lead of a Turkish family who were walking in front of me and ran across during a break in the traffic. After having done this, I fully appreciated what a stupid thing it was to do, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. The street is six lanes wide here, and the drivers coming out of the city are just barreling along. But you can’t really blame them: they aren’t expecting pedestrians to be crossing here, and there’s no reason they should be.

Although the Millet Caddesi is a major obstacle to the walker, the breach through the walls here does at least give you a good sense of the sheer thickness of the inner walls – as shown in my photo, they are 15 feet thick. And once you get north of the boulevard, the walls are attractively maintained and sensibly preserved. By this I mean that most of the restoration work is intended simply to preserve the current structure and integrity of the walls, although one tower has been fully re-created to give visitors some sense of the scale and magnificence that the towers along this stretch once possessed. The roadways swing away from the walls here, and the area at the foot of the walls is beautifully grassed in and carefully mowed and kept tidy. Once you reach the crest of the hill by the gate the Byzantines called that of St. Romanus and the Turks call Top Kapi, a sweeping view extends down into the valley where the Lycus River formerly ran and up the Sixth Hill to the spot where the Theodosian Walls end. There you can see a Turkish flag flying atop the tower next to the Gate of the Kerkoporta, marking one of the two places where the Ottomans finally penetrated into the city on the early morning hours of May 29, 1453.

The stretch of the walls that runs that runs down into the Lycus valley (through which the Vatan Caddesi now runs) and then up to the Edirne Kapi or Gate of Charisius on the Sixth Hill was known to the Byzantines as the Mesoteichon. (The sub-section between the south bank of the Lycus and the St. Romanus/Top Kapi Gate was further known as the Murus Bacchatareus.) The Mesoteichon, the most vulnerable section of the walls, was the center of the Avars’ attacks during the siege in 626 and of the Ottomans’ attacks during their sieges of 1422 and 1453. During the last two sieges, the Ottomans had cannon to bring to bear against the thousand-year-old defensive technology that the walls then reflected. During the 1422 siege these were fairly primitive, but by 1453 the Ottomans' 62 cannon included the massive bronze weapon cast by the Hungarian engineer Urban – almost 27 feet long, 8 feet in diameter at its muzzle, hurling stone balls that weighed 1200 pounds, and requiring 60 oxen to move it. This cannon was set up along the ridge that led to the Gate of St. Romanus, and the impact of its balls and those of its smaller fellows is doubtless a good part of the reason why the towers and walls that stretched ahead of me down the hill were so badly shattered.

Occasionally, when you are visiting a battlefield, you encounter a spot that gives you a much more vivid perspective on the course of the fighting than you can get from reading any number of historical accounts. I had such an experience the first time I stood at the summit of Little Round Top at Gettysburg and looked north along the course of the Union line along Cemetery Ridge, and that morning, looking down into the Lycus Valley from atop the ridge by the St. Romanus Gate, I had another of those epiphanies. The devastation of the walls and towers stretching down to and out of the valley in front of you is tangible and vivid evidence of the violence of the fighting there almost 560 years ago. The wreckage of the walls along this segment readily demonstrates why, in the final days of the siege, the Byzantines were compelled to erect an earth-and-wood stockade in front of the smashed remains of the inner and outer walls in a desperate effort to keep the Turks out. As Van Millingen vividly recounts:

It was along the Mesoteichon that, after an existence of 1,123 years (if you start the clock running with Constantine’s re-dedication of the city in 330 C.E.), the Byzantine Empire finally came to an end in the last hour before dawn on Tuesday, May 29, 1453. The city's defenders mustered only some 7,000 men against an attacking force that numbered well over 100,000 soldiers and sailors. Nevertheless, they had kept the Turks at bay for six weeks, and some of Sultan Mehmet II's advisers had begun counseling him to withdraw. Throughout the long final night of the siege, first the Sultan’s irregular troops, then his Anatolian regiments, and finally his elite Janissaries poured into the valley in front of me in human wave assaults that broke against the improvised barrier, which was held by the Emperor Constantine XI, his kinsmen and nobles, and 400 Genoese volunteers under a condottiere named Giustiniani. But just when it seemed that this latest assault might also fail, fate intervened. Giustiniani was mortally wounded, and too many of his troops fell back to carry him inside the inner wall; some Turks found and slipped through an unsecured postern gate to gain entrance to the tower by the Kerkoporta, the last tower visible along the line of walls to the north; and then a last assault by the Janissaries carried the remains of the improvised barricade, now largely smashed into kindling and earth.

The Emperor and his closest kinsmen and companions died fighting on the parateichon between the outer and inner walls, somewhere along the Mesoteichon. Van Milligen, following the account of the Emperor's secretary Phrantzes, says that he died near the Gate of St. Romanus, meaning the Top Kapi Gate. But the 5th Military Gate on the northern side of the Lycus was also sometimes referred to as the Military Gate of St. Romanus (the military gates were openings in the inner wall that led only to the parateichon), which creates some confusion. If, as is reported, Constantine had ridden north towards the Kerkoporta when he saw the Turkish flag flying there, and had then decided to throw himself into the fighting and meet his death, it might make more sense for him to have done so while coming back down the slope along the northern side of the Lycus, rather than riding all the way down into and back up out of the valley to reach the St. Romanus Gate.

If I’d had another full day – or even a few more hours – in Istanbul, I would have loved to have continued along the walls down into and up the other side of the Lycus Valley, and at least to the Gate of the Kerkoporta, where I could see the Turkish flag occasionally fluttering in the distance. But this would have taken a minimum of another hour, which I did not feel I had. Moreover, the stretch of the walls heading north up the hill beyond the Vatan Caddesi borders a gypsy neighborhood on the east, and at least two of my guidebooks suggested that it could be of questionable safety for a tourist (although from the distance where I was standing, with parkland in front of the wall and a broad avenue running uphill behind it, it did not look threatening). So I followed the route taken by Mehmet "The Conqueror" on the afternoon of May 29th, when he entered the city for the first time through the Gate of St. Romanus, which today is marked with a marble plaque and a huge, poppy-red Turkish flag. Not far from the gate is the Kara Ahmet Pasa Mosque, dating to 1554 and said by the Blue Guide to be "one of the loveliest and most masterful" of the architect Sinan’s works, but I did not feel I had time to spare even to visit it for just a few minutes.

After taking a few photos around the St. Romanus/Top Kapi Gate, I came back out, crossed an overpass over the expressway, and then with the help of a Turk made my way back to the Top Kapi station on the light rail. I got back to my hotel around 10:30, took care of my final packing, and then took a cab over to the airport in plenty of time for my flight to Frankfurt and, eventually, home.

References:

Alexander Van Millingen, Byzantine Constantinople: The Walls of the City and the Adjoining Historical Sites

Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453

Stephen Turnbull, The Walls of Constantinople AD 324 - 1453 (Osprey Fortress Series). This book also provides a useful assessment of the "restoration" work that took place along the walls in the latter 1980's and the first half of the 1990's:

"During the 20th century restoration took the place of repairs in a programme that was much criticized at the time. The restorations were financed in part by UNESCO, but the exigencies of the municipal authority caused the project to be rushed. The work was divided among 11 contractors, with a 'scientific consultant' assigned to each, when one could be located. In most areas the walls were over-restored and refaced rather than being repaired. . . . With the change of government in 1994 the work was abruptly halted."

For an excellent on-line article about the Byzantine land walls, with photographs of practically all the gates, click here.


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