1 januari 2017
Istanbul City Walls/İstanbul Surlari
Surrounding the Historical Peninsula and standing as the greatest architectural structure of the current-day city, the walls of Istanbul constitute a major part of the cultural heritage of the city. The construction of the walls, parts of which are also included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, started in the first quarter of the 5th century; with various additions and repairs in different eras, this line of defense was able to protect the capital of the Byzantine Empire for approximately 11 centuries. The walls are considered among the most important examples of the Roman and Byzantine military architecture surviving to the present day, and a large part of these 24-kilometer-long walls remains today, with 244 towers and 61 gates still standing. However, urbanization and other human activities, along with natural processes and disasters such as earthquakes, have slowly caused the walls to lose some of their original qualities, and thus these threatened monuments are in danger of perishing. The Koç University - Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antiquity and Byzantine Studies (GABAM) initiated a project in 2017 to document this important heritage site and bring together relevant visual and written data to create a digital resource on the city walls. The project aimed big: we wanted to document all aspects of this magnificent defensive system that we are losing piece by piece, gather all related information together and share this data with the world through a digital platform. We immediately began to work with Barış Altan, administrative coordinator of GABAM, and Dr. Nikos Kontogiannis and Merve Özkılıç, project coordinators. Our priority was to document the city walls visually for several reasons. First, the walls were rapidly changing. Urbanization and the fast growth of the city, earthquake tremors, vegetation and weather conditions meant that walls sections could undergo changes in as quickly as a day. Second, we had heard that the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality was to begin restoration works on the city walls, and we wanted to document the monument visually before this work started and the scaffoldings were put up. Photographic documentation involved a huge volume of work: each wall section, tower and gate were to be professionally photographed with all their façades. Gökhan Tan and Görkem Kızılkayak, with project assistant Ali Öz, overcame this difficult task through (not-so-easy) fieldwork that took about two years. This hard but also pleasant task is narrated in Gökhan Tan’s essay on the website (A Personal History of the City Walls). Eventually, all sections of the Land and Sea Walls were documented in their current conditions; from three thousand digital photographs and 40 hour-long drone flights, videos showing the complete line of walls have been prepared, and thus a rich archive has been created. The project was conducted with an international team of approximately 30 experts comprising archeologists, historians, art historians, epigraphists, photographers and other experts in various fields. Prof. Neslihan Asutay-Effenberger acted as the scientific editor of the project, while Prof. Zeynep Ahunbay, Prof. James Crow and Prof. Albrecht Berger constituted the scientific advisory board. About one hundred essays and explanatory texts have been written about the various parts of the project; the wide-ranging essays include texts such as the Theodosian Wall, General Architecture and Disposition of Sea Walls, the Anastasian Wall, Historical Events and the City Walls in Byzantine Period, City Walls in Ottoman Sources, the Theodosian Harbor, Conservation of Istanbul’s City Walls as a World Heritage Site, and Walls in Yeşilçam. All inscriptions and spolia material from the city walls have been studied by experts to be gathered in a database. Inscriptions that remain in situ or moved to Istanbul Archaeological Museums, as well as inscriptions lost but known from sources, were studied by Dr. Hüseyin Sami Öztürk and Ezgi Demirhan Öztürk to be included to the project website. Ayhan Han conducted lengthy research in the Ottoman archives to add more data within the scope of the project. In parallel to this research, we started working on the development of the website, which was led by Hüseyin Kuşcu. All these compiled visual and written materials are shared with the public through an interactive platform. The Istanbul City Walls project is a living project and can always be updated with new data as they emerge. I hope that the Istanbul City Walls Project will be beneficial for scholars who are studying in this field, students and the public. You can find the list of all project members under the section titled “Project Team”. As the director of GABAM, I would like to thank everyone involved in the project. Engin Akyürek