In the year 360, Constantine's son built a magnificent church in Constantinople, specially for the drama of Imperial Communion. Next-door, those same pious emperors built a giant racetrack, a hippodrome. You can still see part of its outline in streets. And here at last, around this old Egyptian obelisk, you can discover something of an atmosphere of ancient Constantinople, the heart of old Byzantium.

 

This stone is like a giant mirror, reflecting all the life that once went on around it. There’s the emperor and his family, Constantine’s successors come to the royal box to start a chariot race. There’s the obelisk in the middle of the racetrack and the chariots too, eight of them running all at once. You need a lot of luck to win.

 

This place wasn’t just a racetrack though. This is a place where people met their emperor and his court. It’s the air, the space of Byzantium, a hundred thousand people roaring, new emperors are presented to them, as captives of foreign wars are brought and thrown at the feet of the emperor. The old Parliament, it’s the real heart of Byzantium and that scene there maybe you've seen it before. Look at it carefully, the emperor's in the middle with his family, just like God. Around them stand the army and the court, just like the saints. Beneath them, begging mercy are Byzantium’s enemies, the damned. It’s a grand last judgment right here on earth with the emperor playing God.

 

So that’s it, really. The emperor brings happiness and harmony, the theater brings luck and victory .This is the center of the world, an image, you might say, of heaven on earth. So if we’d pushed open the gates of the imperial palace, the one stood beside the hippodrome, we’d have really been opening the earthly gates of paradise.

 

Arcades of gold and marble, silver boats on pools of mercury, silk carpets, golden thrones in halls of porphyry bowls, all have gone, only echoes of them still remain in Syria and Italy.