Dynastic History | Column of Constantine, Çemberlitaş — The Hooped Stone at the Centre of a New Capital

Constantine set a column of seven porphyry drums in the middle of his new oval forum around 328, and on top of it a bronze figure of himself carrying a spear and an orb and wearing a seven-pointed radiate crown. The city's formal dedication followed on 11 May 330, and the anniversary was kept for centuries afterwards. The shaft rose some 35 metres above the pavement of its day; the ground has risen around it since.

Very little of it stayed as built. Iron rings were fitted round the shaft early in the fifth century to hold the drums together, and it is those bands, not the emperor, that give the monument its Turkish name — Çemberlitaş, the hooped stone. A gale in 1105 or 1106 brought down the statue and the upper drums; Anna Komnene records it. Manuel I Komnenos put a cross up in place of the figure, with an inscription saying that what time had damaged, the pious emperor had renewed. A fire through the surrounding quarter in 1779 left the shaft scorched, and Abdülhamid I had built round its foot the masonry base that is still there. European visitors afterwards called it the Burnt Column.

The relics said to lie beneath it — the Palladium carried from Troy, fragments of the crosses of the two thieves, the baskets from the loaves and fishes — belong to a tradition that accumulated around the column rather than to any record of what was placed there. What the claims register is what the base was expected to be worth.

The column stands beside the tram line at Çemberlitaş, in the middle of a working street.

📸 Cover: a 1905 photograph of the column, published by the Neue Photographische Gesellschaft, Berlin; public domain, via SALT Research on Wikimedia Commons — a historical photograph, not a present-day view