Bog Myrtle & Peat

Drops of water fall from the ceiling of Istanbul’s Basilica Cistern. It’s cool and even-handed underground where the Byzantine emperor Justinian built one of several enormous water tanks for his ancient capital city. Plopping, gin-clear pools are underlit by clever modern lighting, and a walkway allows tourists to wander freely around the remains of this enormously elegant hole-in-the-ground.

Perhaps it doesn’t sound like much, but the most impressive parts of ancient Byzantium were borrowed from elsewhere. The city is founded upon an endless and recurring process of lending and passing down, and while some of these objects were deliberately stolen and brought here as a gesture of conquest, others were here but have been stolen when the city itself was overturned. This cistern is fascinating because it’s made from a thousand little stealings; a heaped-up patchwork of odds and sods from all across the ancient world.

For Justinian, it hardly mattered what the cistern looked like inside – it simply had to last forever. There was no need for showiness in an underground water tank, so all kinds of stone were used to construct a forest of pillars which stand in crowds like a maze. Most of these are plain, soapy-cold marbles with no specific origin; they run almost without interruption from the floor to the ceiling. Some are dressed with ornate capitals which were clearly salvaged from other buildings, providing a gaudy flourish for the darkness. Elsewhere and more dramatically, there are columns which seem to have been stolen from temples or celebratory architecture – one is riddled with beautiful pock-markings, while another bears an abstract line of broken Greek lettering. It’s like an ancient scrapyard; a place where once-fine stonework was sent to die in the unlit mould and mildew. But best of all, two of the columns are supported by the vast, semi-formed heads of mythological Gorgons. 

Who knows where they came from. From the moment they were repurposed, their point of origin hardly mattered – they belonged to the basilica. They’re immaculate and wonderful, and defaced only insofar as one is upside down and the other lies on its side. You could wonder if this allows them to provide better, stronger support for the columns which rest upon them, but there’s something calculated about their deliberate misuse. After all, the famous “Medusa” is exactly the same height and strength whether she’s upside down or the right way up. It’s like a deliberate joke – a bare-faced deflection of their original significance. If these Gorgons were very offensive, they would have been smashed or broken off. In this case, the mythological creature is just being made to look silly; her original powers defused by a simple, clumsy “oops”. And because we don’t know what they looked like in their original setting, they’re only this now.

There was a queue of people to visit these Gorgons, which are the most famous part of a well-visited tourist attraction in the heart of Sultanahmet. Many were tourists from western Europe, and a surprising number bore the horrible scars of recent cosmetic surgeries. The mens’ heads were prickled and swollen with hair replacement treatments; through sterilised plastic masks, I saw several women with their noses black and broken with reconstruction. It’s harder to detect some of the other surgeries, but one man with a Brummie accent laughed and showed his upper and lower teeth in a barricade of veneers like the keyboard of a Hammond organ. They were passing time before their flights home, and for every person who bore the painful-looking scars of a redesign, I wondered how many were knocked flat in their hotel rooms, unable to enjoy anything like a holiday after invasive, agonising procedures.

These people had been told to expect a Gorgon, but the stones sit so unexpectedly below waist height in a shallowness of underlit water that it’s easy to miss them. I would have made the same mistake if I hadn’t slavishly read the book in advance and made myself giddy with nerdish anticipation. So most eyes were drawn instead to a contemporary bronze sculpture of a Gorgon which forms part of a sound and light display in the cistern. It’s pretty cool in its own right, but it’s only a response to the original stones.

Over twenty minutes, I counted a hundred people past me in the cool half-darkness and realised that most were missing the actual Gorgons. At times, there were queues to photograph the bronze sculpture, and people were leaning against the originals to get better angles on the modern display. Twenty people photographed the actual Gorgons in that time. Many photographed both, but sixty people photographed the sculpture only. As more people arrived and saw the bronze being photographed, momentum seemed to grow and reverberate in its favour. They’d been told to expect a Gorgon, and the bronze was much more comprehensible than the original stones. After all, snakes looped threateningly from her hair; there was nothing passive or glossy eyed about this monster – she was infinitely more sinister and compelling.

A little while later, I stopped in the gift shop to buy some postcards. There was a display of fridge magnets beside the till; twenty little plaster effigies of the upside-down Gorgon stones were presented in a row and offered for sale at 200Tl a shot. Fresh from his time in the basilica, a bored-looking teenager fiddled with the postcards and looked at the stickers while his parents dithered over a selection of souvenir ceramics. There was no flicker of recognition in his face when he saw the Gorgon magnets. Instead, he passed a happy minute amending their error, turning each one the wrong way up.