Just as all the ancient roads and sea lanes ran through the empire to Constantinople, so did the rivers of the region. Channeled into great aqueducts, bringing treasured water to a thirsty city. Underneath the town, cut deep into its hilltop, an eerie underworld, some 15 centuries’ old. Fresh water systems, so that the Byzantines could bathe just like the Romans do in marble halls, and every thing made with the dazzling technology of ancient Rome, father of Byzantium. Marble columns, high brick vaults, the dark forests of Byzantium, beneath modern Istanbul. Those Greek letters, hammered into the column with a chisel point, the marks of one of Marmara’s quarrymen.

 

Food, too, flooded into the enlarging city. What a vast logistic exercise, and an earthly miracle, supporting Constantinople’s half a million people, Europe’s biggest city, and every thing cause, by hand. There was no food industry. Everything was carried here in boats and carts. The finest fish, the Byzantines believed, were caught beside the emperor’s palace, between the rising of the Pleiades and the settings of a blood red star of Arcturus. Colors, smells and textures of the ancient everyday, the raw ingredients of Byzantine experience, the world of the ancient Mediterranean.