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The Harbour Beneath Yenikapı, the Theodosius Harbour and the Marmaray Dig

A few metres beneath the floor you cross when you step off the Marmaray and walk to the metro at Yenikapı lies a harbour where, fifteen hundred years ago, grain ships from Egypt dropped anchor.

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The Harbour Beneath Yenikapı, the Theodosius Harbour and the Marmaray Dig

A few metres beneath the floor you cross when you step off the Marmaray and walk to the metro at Yenikapı lies a harbour where, fifteen hundred years ago, grain ships from Egypt dropped anchor. Most of the passengers who pass the boat installation filled with amphorae and the replica finds in the corridors of the transfer centre today have no idea that the excavation carried out here between 2004 and 2013 pushed the city's history back eight and a half thousand years. In this article we tell how the Theodosius Harbour was founded and how it was buried under soil, we look at the thirty-seven Byzantine ships that came out of the Marmaray and metro dig and the Neolithic footprints left in the mud, and we explain where all of this can be seen today.

An emperor's grain harbour

Yenikapı is a neighbourhood on the Marmara shore of the Fatih district, spread around the junction of Kennedy Avenue and Mustafa Kemal Avenue. It takes its name from one of the gates in the Theodosian walls, and in the twentieth century it was known as an entertainment district of music halls, tea gardens and a funfair. The story of the harbour beneath the neighbourhood is far older. According to the Turkish Wikipedia article on the Theodosius Harbour, the port was built in the reign of Theodosius I, who ruled between 379 and 395, that is at the end of the fourth century. An earlier harbour known as the Harbour of Eleutherios had existed on the same shore; when the forum of Theodosius was built that old harbour was filled in and the new one was laid out on this coast.

The harbour's real business was grain. The bread of Constantinople depended largely on Egypt, and ships sailing from Alexandria unloaded their cargo here. The article by Sait Başaran and Ufuk Kocabaş in Colloquium Anatolicum explains how the position of Byzantion between Anatolia and the Balkans, and between the Black Sea and the Aegean, gave it an advantage in maritime trade; fishing mattered enough for the migration of the bonito to be stamped on the city's coins. According to Zeynep Kızıltan's article in the same journal, the Theodosius Harbour was one of the most important harbours of Constantinople and today the best known in the world.

Its location was no accident. Yenikapı was the bay where the Lykos, the only stream inside the walls and known today as the Bayrampaşa Creek, flowed into the sea. Kızıltan's article states that the harbour was built right at the mouth of this stream. The bay was sheltered from the prevailing winds of the Marmara; yet the stream that made the harbour would eventually finish it.

The soil the Lykos brought

When Egypt came under Arab rule in the middle of the seventh century the wheat shipments stopped. The Wikipedia article gives the date as 641, and the commercial weight of the harbour declined from then on. According to the Arkeofili article, based on the account of the excavation team, the alluvium carried by the Lykos began to fill the bay from the seventh century onwards. After the eleventh century the silting accelerated, and by the twelfth century the harbour had partly turned into dry land. The brief of the architectural competition opened by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in 2020 summarises the same process; the area, known as the Theodosius Harbour in Byzantine times, slowly filled with sediment from the stream and in the Ottoman period became the Langa Gardens, which grew vegetables for the city.

What the excavation team found in the Ottoman layers confirms this. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the area had been completely filled and used as a neighbourhood and market gardens; numerous wells and remains of structures built of stone and mud came to light. So when the Marmaray construction began, the archaeologists meeting first an Ottoman neighbourhood, then a Byzantine harbour and, at the very bottom, a village from eight thousand years ago was not a surprise but the natural order of the geography.

When the Marmaray shovel struck the harbour

The Istanbul Archaeology Museums began a rescue excavation at Yenikapı in 2004 as part of the Marmaray and metro projects. According to Kızıltan's article this was the first systematic investigation of a Byzantine harbour in the history of Istanbul; the harbour appeared only one metre below sea level, and the dig spread over an area of more than fifty-eight thousand square metres. The page of the Istanbul Governorship gives the scale of the work; over roughly ten years, between six hundred and a thousand excavation workers, fifty specialists and twenty universities and institutes took part. The Wikipedia article on the Yenikapı shipwrecks writes that a fill twelve metres thick was removed layer by layer over an area of fifty-eight dönüm.

The excavation delayed the opening of the Marmaray by years; the Wikipedia article on the Marmaray reminds us that the first section could only open on 29 October 2013. But the reward for the delay was the largest group of medieval ships ever to come out of a single excavation site in the world.

Thirty-seven ships, one harbour

According to a 2021 report by Anadolu Agency, thirty-seven Byzantine wrecks dated between the fifth and eleventh centuries were found at Yenikapı. Some sources give the range as the fifth to the tenth century; Prof. Dr. Ufuk Kocabaş, who leads the Yenikapı Shipwrecks Project, describes it as the largest collection of medieval shipwrecks in the world. The ships fall into three groups. Small oared craft, medium-sized boats and large merchant vessels. According to Wikipedia, the oared galleys of the Galea type are the first archaeologically attested examples of the oared warships of the Byzantine navy.

Each wreck has its own small story. Yenikapı 1 carried iron anchors from the tenth century and Ganos-type amphorae used for transporting wine. Yenikapı 35 was a fifth-century ship, and inside it were found one hundred and twenty-seven stacked amphorae of the Crimean type; the residue at the bottom of the jars pointed to fish sauce. The team found traces of anchovy in many amphorae. The best known wreck is Yenikapı 12, found in 2007 and dated to the ninth century. This small coastal trading vessel carried a cargo of amphorae; in a separate compartment at the stern lay the captain's personal belongings. According to the Governorship's page, cherry stones and olive stones also came out of the same ship, which means the boat sank on a summer day. The excavation also yielded wooden writing tablets filled with wax and jeweller's scales; Anadolu Agency speaks of sixty thousand artefacts in total.

Harbour structures came to light as well. Wikipedia mentions a harbour wall fifty-one metres long and four metres twenty centimetres wide, the foundations of piers, and fortification remains attributed to the period of Theodosius II. In other words, Yenikapı yielded not only the ships but also the quay they tied up to.

Footprints from eight thousand years ago

The layer beneath the ships held the real surprise of the dig. According to the Governorship's page, at the deepest level a Neolithic settlement from eight thousand to eight thousand two hundred years ago was found; this is the oldest known settlement on the historic peninsula. As Arkeofili reports, these people lived at a time when the Marmara had not yet mixed with salt water and was a brackish lake. Their houses were built in the wattle-and-daub technique, carried on wooden posts. Remains of wheat and the bones of dogs, sheep, goats and pigs show that farming and animal husbandry were established. The dead who were cremated before burial are considered the earliest known examples of cremation in Anatolian archaeology.

The most moving find is the footprints pressed into the mud. According to Anadolu Agency, two thousand and eighty footprints from the Pottery Neolithic period were documented, ranging in length from sixteen to twenty-nine centimetres. Arkeofili writes that ninety-five percent of the prints were made by shod feet and that about a thousand of them were lifted and taken to the museum. The Governorship's page gives a higher total; the numbers vary from source to source, but the outcome is the same, the steps of Istanbul's first inhabitants are under protection today.

Where the ships are today

Most of the wrecks still cannot be seen, and there is a reason for that. As Anadolu Agency reported from Kocabaş in 2018, the timber that comes out of the water is first desalinated for at least five years in forty-five tanks, then documented in three dimensions and freeze-dried; the conservation of a single ship can take six to nine years. At that date the conservation of four of the thirty-seven wrecks had been completed and twenty-seven were being studied at Istanbul University. Four wrecks had been conserved at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Bodrum by specialists from Texas A&M University. Most of the ships, as the Governorship also writes, sit in two laboratories at Yenikapı. Kocabaş says that a conserved ship can never be moved again, which is why the museum must be built next to the ships.

The museum has been on the agenda for years. According to Anadolu Agency's 2021 report, there was first a design for a museum at Yenikapı approved in 2015; forty-two projects entered the Theodosius Harbour Archaeological Site competition opened by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in 2020, and the competition asked for a visitor centre integrated with the transfer centre below it, for an area of roughly thirty-seven thousand square metres in the Yalı neighbourhood of Fatih. According to the same report, the artefacts from the dig were at that date being kept at the Istanbul Archaeology Museums while they waited for the museum. Until the visitor centre opens there are three addresses for seeing the harbour.

Where to see it today

The first is the Yenikapı Transfer Centre itself. According to Wikipedia, the Marmaray station opened on 29 October 2013, the M2 line in February 2014 and the M1 line in November 2014; inside the centre there is an exhibition area called the Yenikapı Excavations. In the corridors you will see replicas of the excavation finds, a boat installation filled with amphorae set into a wall clad in blue waves, and panels telling the story of the dig. Give it five minutes while changing trains; the labels in the cases tell you which replica belongs to which period.

The second is the Rahmi M. Koç Museum. According to Istanbul University's news, a full-size copy of Yenikapı 12 was built in about a year and a half under the EU-supported Limen project and launched at Tuzla in 2017. As Hürriyet reports, the boat was first displayed for about a year in the garden of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums and was seen by close to four hundred thousand visitors; since February 2019 it has been moored at the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Hasköy. The closest look at the ninth-century captain's boat today is here.

The third is the Istanbul Archaeology Museums in Gülhane. This is the institution that ran the excavation, and most of the finds are kept here. According to Wikipedia the museum hosted the exhibition 8000 Years of Istanbul in 2007 and, between 25 June 2013 and 25 January 2014, the large exhibition Stories from the Hidden Harbour; more than two hundred and eighty-three thousand people visited the latter. According to the Ministry's page the museum stands on Osman Hamdi Bey Slope off Alemdar Avenue, in the building completed in 1891 to the design of Alexander Vallaury. Check the museum's official website before your visit to see which of the Yenikapı finds are on display in the galleries; opening days and ticket information are there too.

How to visit

The most practical order is this. Come to Yenikapı by Marmaray or metro, see the exhibition in the station, then go out on the Kennedy Avenue side and look at the shore where the harbour once lay; today the sea is a few hundred metres further south. Then take the Marmaray to Sirkeci and walk up to Gülhane to see the Byzantine and Neolithic galleries at the Archaeology Museums. If you cross to the Rahmi M. Koç Museum on the Golden Horn at the end of the day, you can examine the copy of Yenikapı 12 in daylight. Coming early in the morning lets you see the cases in the station without the crowds. One day, when the visitor centre on the harbour site opens, these three addresses will become a single route; until then the city's oldest steps wait in the sand and its ships wait inside the tanks.

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