Dynastic History | Istanbul Archaeological Museums — The Emperors' Coffins Outlived the Mausoleum

Four porphyry sarcophagi stand in the open beside the museum's main building, lids askew, empty. They came from about three kilometres away, from the Church of the Holy Apostles.

Constantine dedicated a church on that ground around 330 and left it unfinished; Constantius II completed it and buried his father there about 337. Justinian rebuilt it, and the new building was consecrated on 28 June 550. For roughly seven centuries it was the burial church of the eastern Roman emperors — the state that called itself Roman and its people Rhomaioi, and that much later writers renamed Byzantine. Something in the order of forty emperors and members of their households were laid there, from Constantine I to Constantine VIII, who died in 1028.

The stone is the point. Imperial porphyry came from state quarries in Egypt's Eastern Desert that had stopped supplying by late antiquity, so the stock of purple coffins was fixed and reused. Being buried in one was a claim about rank before it was anything else.

Niketas Choniates, a Roman official who lived through it, records that during the Latin occupation after 1204 the imperial tombs were broken open at night and stripped of their gold and gems, Justinian's among them. After 1453 the church briefly housed the Ecumenical Patriarchate, was left, and was pulled down in 1461–62; the Fatih Camii was built on the site.

The boxes were gathered up afterwards and are now split between here, the atrium of Hagia Eirene, and a fragment inside the museum shown as possibly Constantine's own — on an attribution the museum itself calls uncertain.

📸 Cover: an imperial porphyry sarcophagus standing outside the museum building, Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons