ABSTRACT
With its cool interior, low-level lighting and piped classical music, the cathedral-sized Basilica Cistern (Yerebatan Sarayı) is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Istanbul, providing a welcome escape from the heat and the crowds. Although the interior is beautiful, its origins are strictly utilitarian. The 336 marble columns create a vast tank, capable of holding 80,000m3 of water, the largest of several hundred underground cisterns that supplied the thirsty citizens of Constantinople, as Istanbul was formerly known. The city planners were careful not only to provide good water storage, but also to protect the source. Centuries ago all the drinking water for the city came from the Belgrad forest and was piped to the city’s central square, Taksim. The Basilica Cistern was built in the 6th century, during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I to store water for the great palaces of the city. A thousand years later, the Ottoman court architect Mimar Sinan’s magnificent Maglova Aqueduct also brought water from the edges of the forest to the centre of the old city.
