Cistern of Aetius

The Cistern of Aetius was an important Byzantine water reservoir in the city of Constantinople. Once one of the largest Byzantine cisterns, it is now a football stadium in Istanbul. Since 1928 it has been known as or, while in the Ottoman period it was known as the.

Location

The cistern is located in Istanbul, in the district of Fatih, in the neighborhood of Karagümrük, about southeast of the Gate of Edirne of the city walls, along Fevzi Paşa Caddesi. It lies at the upper end of the valley which divides the fifth and the sixth hills of Constantinople.

History

Although according to a late tradition, the erection of the cistern, which lay in the fourteenth region of Constantinople, dates back to the reign of Emperor Valens, it is ascertained that it was built in 421 by Aetius, praefectus urbi in Constantinople in 419 and praefectus praetorio Orientis in 425, under Emperor Theodosius II. The cistern was confused in scholarship for a long time with the cistern of Bonus or with that of Aspar: only in recent times has its identification become certain. The giant tank was oriented parallel to one branch of the Mese, the main road of the city which connected the Gate of Charisios with the center of the city passing near the Church of the Holy Apostles, and was supplied by the water main connected to the Valens Aqueduct. Due to its huge dimensions, in the Byzantine age the reservoir was often used as reference point to locate other buildings, like the monasteries of Prodomos of Petra, of the Romans and of Mara.
After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the 16th-century French traveller Pierre Gilles reported that around 1540 the reservoir was already empty. In the Ottoman period, as its Turkish name Çukurbostan betrays, the structure was used as vegetable garden.
Since the 1920s the structure has been turned into a sports ground, and since 1928 it hosts a football stadium, the Karagümrük stadium, which is the home stadium of Fatih Karagümrük SK team.

Identification problem

Attempts to identify the location of the Cistern of Aetius started quite late. The cistern has been successively identified with a cistern located near the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, and now disappeared; the cistern located in the court of the little Kefeli Mosque; the vaulted cistern located southeast of the Çukurbostan of the Gate of Adrianople and known as Zina Yokusu Bodrumi. The key to the eventual establishment of its location lay in the information that the Cistern of Aetius was located near the monastery of Prodomos of Petra, which was surely in the valley dividing the fifth and the sixth hills: this led to its identification with the Çukurbostan near the Gate of Adrianople.

Description

The cistern has a rectangular plan with huge dimensions, being long and wide: its average depth lies between and. Its capacity was about of water. Its walls, thick and partially still in place, were built according to the Roman constructive technique named opus listatum by alternating four courses of bricks and ten courses of stone, an elegant pattern similar to that used by the cistern of Aspar. It has been hypothesized that this reservoir was used to supply with water the moat of the city walls, but it is more plausible that it was a central reservoir whence the water was distributed in the city.