In the first centuries of Byzantium, slaves in their tens of thousands worked in these marble hills. How the Byzantines love marble! In marbles, says a priest, God trapped fields of flowers and mountain forests, and fish and fruit, and melting snows. The ancient blocks still strew across the kies, hint at the frantic energy that was once used to move their precious stone. Still inside the modern quarries, a ancient stone that weighs around a hundred tons, part of an enormous column, to memorialize the military victories of Byzantium. If it were finished, we'd have had a spiral staircase cutting in, and roses sculpture of soldiers on its turning surface. Still here though, it cracked as it was quarried.

 

In ancient times, these quarries were called the quarries of the mother of God. They might just as well being called the quarries of the mother of Constantinople. The whole city was made here, and it was prefab city. Wasn’t just sent off in blocks, every thing was finished, these have been finished, and gone to Constantinople, each one had been lettered. They had exact place in every one of the ancient buildings of the city. This, for example, is the very tip of a building that would have looked like a Roman temple.

 

Modern quarry masters tell me that they found the best new scenes of marble in the hills, beside the ancient stones. This is a bare good spot then, a giant lonely column shaft. I’ve seen that same shape, so-called peacock’s feather pattern, cut on a broken column lying right on the main streets of old Istanbul.