Byzantine horses, bred for carrying large loads, were controlled by iron bits that eroded their upper palates and wore through the bone. Here, a ventral view of a horse skull, from the Middle Byzantine period.
Byzantine horses, bred for carrying large loads, were controlled by iron bits that eroded their upper palates and wore through the bone. Here, a ventral view of a horse skull, from the Middle Byzantine period. © RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA FOR THE NEW YORKER

When it came to choosing the exact location of the first tunnel spanning the Bosporus—the narrow strait that divides the European and Asian sides of Istanbul and links the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara—one of the principal considerations was how to avoid encountering any archeological marvels. The tunnel was for a new high-speed train called Marmaray (a combination of “Marmara” and ray, the Turkish word for “rail”), connecting to Istanbul’s metro system. Of particular concern was the placement of the main station on the European shore, on the site of ancient Byzantium and Constantinople: everything within the ancient city walls has been designated both by UNESCO and by the Turkish government as a historical site, and all digging must be supervised by the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The location that was eventually chosen, in the working-class district of Yenikapı, had conveniently spent much of antiquity underwater. In Byzantine times, it was a harbor.

“What’s going to turn up in a harbor?” one official explained, when I asked about the decision. “Seabed and sand fill. Architectural structures aren’t going to turn up.”

Byzantine shipwrecks found during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus held up work for years.Byzantine shipwrecks found during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus held up work for years.
Byzantine shipwrecks found during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus held up work for years.Byzantine shipwrecks found during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus held up work for years. - ... a tiny Byzantine church did turn up in Yenikapı, under the foundations of some razed apartment buildings. But the real problem was the large number of Byzantine shipwrecks that began to surface soon after the excavation began, in 2004. Dating from the fifth to the eleventh century, the shipwrecks illustrated a previously murky chapter in the history of shipbuilding and were exceptionally well preserved, having apparently been buried in sand during a series of natural disasters. In accordance with Turkish law, control of the site shifted to the museum, and use of mechanical tools was suspended. From 2005 to 2013, workers with shovels and wheelbarrows extracted a total of thirty-seven shipwrecks. When the excavation reached what had been the bottom of the sea, the archeologists announced that they could finally cede part of the site to the engineers, after one last survey of the seabed—just a formality, really, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. That’s when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from around 6000 B.C. It was previously unknown that anyone had lived on the site of the old city before around 1300 B.C. The excavators, attempting to avoid traces of Istanbul’s human history, had ended up finding an extra five thousand years of it. It took five years to excavate the Neolithic layer, which yielded up graves, huts, cultivated farmland, wooden tools, and some two thousand human footprints, miraculously preserved in a layer of silt-covered mud. In the Stone Age, the water level of the Bosporus was far lower than it is now; there’s a chance that the people who left those prints might have been able to walk from Anatolia to Europe. Exciting as these discoveries were for archeologists, they did not delight the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had been championing the tunnel since he was mayor of Istanbul, in the nineteen-nineties. (He has been President since 2014.) Istanbul is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, with a population of more than fourteen million—up from less than a million in 1950—and, according to a recent study, it has the worst traffic in the world. In 2013, at least two million people crossed the Bosporus daily, by bridge or ferry; the number of motor-vehicle crossings rose eleven hundred and eighty per cent between 1988 and 2012. The tunnel was long overdue. © RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA FOR THE NEW YORKER; SOURCE: ISTANBUL UNIVERSITY YENIKAPI SHIPWRECKS PROJECT