Deciding to dig a hole in an ancient city full of archeological mysteries is a doomed venture.

In the centre of Mexico City, for instance, is the Zócalo, the square fronting the cathedral, which tends to sink at one end. It was built by the Aztecs, surrounded by pyramidical structures bright with colour and Jaguar emblems. Horrified by this pagan island city on its artificial lake, the Spanish drained it, and destroyed the ritual centre.

When a French company dug the Mexico City underground in the 1970’s, they discovered the history wasn’t quite true. Bits of the Aztec ruins had simply been buried, and remained just under the surface. By 1982, commuters caught escalators that took them through layers of ruin, a strange daily journey through a sedimentary history of terrifying ceremonial, occupation, destruction and erasure.

Even in Melbourne, attempts to build office blocks in the Little Lon region have uncovered the unremembered detritus of a legendary zone, invested by respectable Victorians with all the evils that lay beyond their collective repressions.

In Istanbul, the Turks are trying to build a huge tunnel under the Bosphorus, called the Marmaray Project, which will one day carry trains with a million passengers a day. By 2005, they were already being criticised as cavalier about their own history, although both the Romans and the Greeks have built similar systems whose stations are carved through history. They submitted monthly archeological reports to their Japanese investors, they endured complaints about the failure to protect an Islamic wall from which caravabs departed for Mecca, and they planned a museum in a railway station for a boat found on the site of the largest station.

But city officials claimed they would indeed stop for anything that would “change the archaeological history of Istanbul”. And nothing found so far had stopped their relentless progress.

Then they went back to that boat. They had already been warned – thirty years earlier, the German archeologist Wolfgang Muller-Wiener reckoned the tumble of houses covered an ancient harbour. As they dug further, they found their own repressed past – the Christian world beneath the Islamic overlay.

”Yenikapi on the European side of the city was selected to house a state-of-the-art train station. But when shanty homes were cleared from the site, archaeologists uncovered treasures beneath of a kind never before discovered here.

Just a few metres below ground, they found an ancient port of Constantinople – named in historical records as the Eleutherios harbour, one of the busiest of Byzantium.”

Now it is one of the biggest digs in Europe, recorded by this vast image of a very big, flat hole….

”with 50 archaeologists and 750 workers excavating in shifts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in an area the size of 10 city blocks. It’s also an excavation that has turned up one superlative after another…the earliest, the first, the most. So far, the site has yielded the oldest settlement in Istanbul, the earliest known city wall of Constantinople, and at last count 22 shipwrecks, including the first Byzantine galleys ever found. It may, some say, be the greatest nautical archaeological site of all time.”

As The Times quotes James Delgado, of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) at Texas A&M University

”This is one of the greatest nautical archaeological sites of all time, a repository of forgotten Byzantine shipbuilding,” he says. “After analysis, the work at Yenikapi should rewrite the book on Byzantine shipbuilding, and the role of maritime trade in the history of Constantinople.”

Some of the vessels are merchantmen, with cargoes preserved by the thick mud, while others may be warships. One ship, Hull 6, dates from the 7th century and will allow important comparisons with the coeval Yassiada ship. Excavated more than 40 years ago, this is an example of nautical technology at the pinnacle of Byzantine power.

Besides wood, thousands of pieces of broken ceramic, bones,coins and the stumps of the wharf used to unload horses, the site has yielded coils of rope preserved for a thousand years, iron anchors so valuable they were dowry items, and a mysterious tunnel made of limestone slabs. The buried hulls can be reshaped to understand the geometry of the ships – this I think is the longboat which could be the first Byzantine naval vessel ever found.

Now called (perhaps for publicity purposes) the ‘Port of Theodosius”, the site was an extension of a major port, the Eleutherion. Archeologists already the rough location of that site. It seems the remains here were preserved because the whole area was wrecked in a single storm around 1000 AD, creating a shambles so ugly it was abandoned. As it silted up, the Ottomans grew vegetables on the site.

The Turks have wrestled with the city’s Byzantine and Christian heritage, smashing what they see as offensive, neglecting what they don’t value. It seems their attitude is changing – some of the Yenikapi material is part of an exhibition which acknowledges pre-Turkish history.

At the moment, all the engineers can do is wait, allegedly losing a million dollars a day, as the archeologists deploy an army of excavators with toothbrushes and tiny airbrushes.

At least the company can take photographs – it has a large site which records many, many images of technological triumph in all their locations except Yenikapi. Here they have posted an extensive series which records an ever more alarming hole in the ground.

There’s a good recent story about the excavation here, which is my source for some of the pictures. Wired is ecstatic about the technological hooey around the deepest undersea tunnel in the world. Hubpages found some useful links.

Whole item originally located by Cronaca.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 2:34 am and is filed under history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.