Dynastic History | Great Palace Mosaic Museum — The Palace Floor Under the Mosque's Rent Shops

In 1935 a University of St Andrews team, working for the Walker Trust, began cutting down beneath the Arasta Bazaar — an early seventeenth-century row of shops built as endowment property, whose rents paid for the upkeep of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and its charitable foundations. Underneath was a colonnaded courtyard of the Great Palace of the eastern Roman emperors, roughly 55 by 66 metres, its walkways floored end to end in figured mosaic. A second campaign in the early 1950s found an apsed hall on the same alignment.

Less than a quarter of an estimated 1,900 square metres survives, and what survives is not emperors. It is at least seventy-five scenes in horizontal registers: hunting, animals fighting, a man milking a goat, children rolling hoops, a griffin taking prey. Scholars generally read the programme as the court's picture of the countryside it drew its revenue from, and of order kept over it.

Nobody agrees when it was laid. Proposals have run from the early fifth century to about 700, and emperors from Justin II to Heraclius have been put forward. Current opinion mostly holds that it cannot be earlier than Justinian I (r. 527–565), and recent work places it in the late sixth or early seventh century. The floor is dated by argument, not by a document.

The ministry's own account has it constituted as a museum in 1953 under the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, moved to the Hagia Sophia administration in 1979, and conserved from the early 1980s to 1997 with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It is currently listed as closed for restoration, with no reopening date announced. The door is on Torun Sokak, inside the Arasta.

📸 Cover: a griffin taking prey, detail of the peristyle floor, Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons