1,500-Year-Old Byzantine Port Discovered

Associated Press ^ | July 22, 2006 | Benjamin Harvey

[Clintonfatigued]

It seems a typical scene of urban decay: abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, trash and broken wine bottles.

Yet it's more than 1,500 years old. Engineers uncovered these ruins of an ancient Byzantine port during drilling for a huge underground rail tunnel.

Like Romans, Athenians and residents of other great historic cities, the people of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up something important.

But the ancient port uncovered last November in the Yenikapi neighborhood is of a different scale: It has grown into the largest archaeological dig in Istanbul's history, and the port's extent is only now being revealed.

Archaeologists call it the "Port of Theodosius," after the emperor of Rome and Byzantium who died in A.D. 395. They expect to gain insights into ancient commercial life in the city, once called Constantinople, that was the capital of the eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

[stripes1776]

When I was in Ephesus the tour guide never once mentioned Greek or any reference to Byzantium.

Neither did the Greek-speaking Roman citizens who lived in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. It was Western scholars in the 18th century who gave the name Byzantium to that part of the Roman Empire that survived in the eastern Mediterannean after the western part of the empire collapsed due to the invasions of Germanic tribes.

Perhaps the name change was intended to distinguish between the remaining Roman Empire in the east and the Holy Roman Empire that was established in the West by the Germanic kings. But as someone pointed out long ago, the Holy Roman Empire established by Charlemagne (roughly France and Germany, and greately reduced in size after his death) was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

But Byzantium also carries associations related to the word byzantine, meaning complex intrigue, cunning, and devious. This may be an unfair way of thinking about the Byzantine Empire.

Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire are so ingrained in the diction of West Europeans and Americans that we are forced to use the terms or else risk being misunderstood. Obviously your Turkish guided didn't understand the Western usage or choose to ignore it.

Of course never once was the significance of Christianity in Ephesus ever mentioned.

That is rather unfortunate, particularly if the tourists were primarily Christian. But then the Turks did a rather thorough job of converting their Christian slaves to Islam, as well as slaughtering those Christians who refused to surrender as slaves. Did the guide mention that?