Istanbul: Past and Future Colliding

The largest and most expensive ($3 billion) rail and tunneling project ever attempted has run into what may be the richest archaeological site of the 21st century. What fun! It's future vs. past, culture vs. engineering, Byzantium vs. Turkey--the super smackdown. Oh yeah, there's earthquakes too.

Where does all this play out? In modern Istanbul--or rather, in modernizing Istanbul, a city of 10 million people which sits on the the Bosporus, a strait connecting the Mediterranean and Black Seas. It's also the dividing line between Europe and Asia.

You may remember the place from your history classes as Constantinople. Folks have lived there for millennia. In the 4th century Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, made the city his capital--hence its name. While the Western Roman Empire fell, Constantinople remained as capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium, until the time of the Crusades.

First as Constantinople, later as Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, and finally as capital of Turkey, the city has been a major port and harbor controlling commerce between Eruope and Asia. It's also become a modern city: smoggy, congested, and unmanageable.

Turkey is investing $3 billion to build 48 miles of new railroad and 8 miles of underground tunnel to connect the European and Asian sides. The photo at right is of a digging machine used to bore through bedrock .

This will be the deepest tunnel ever attempted. According to WIred Magazine, "It'll be the deepest such tunnel in the world, under 180 feet of water and 15 feet of earth, made of 11 steel-and-concrete sections that can be as long as 440 feet and weigh 18,000 tons."

In an earthquake-prone area. How likely is another earthquake there? News outlets reported on a study released last year, which said a 6.8+ quake within 30 years is very likely, and would cause up to 50,000 buildings to fall in Istanbul.

50,000 buildings! Would you want to ride the subway there?

So...we've got a congested city trying to alleviate both city traffic and intercontinental shipping by building the deepest underground rail system ever attempted, in an earthquake zone. Now what?

Well, in 2005, the diggers found the remains of the original 4th century port. Of course, everyone wants to preserve what they can, but the delays cost Turkey a million dollars a day, according to Wired.

The archaeological finds just keep on coming. Preservation efforts are going 24/7, but the ancient harbor unearthed at Yenikapi has produced 23 shipwrecks so far, spanning the centuries. Each is priceless, but the city needs its transportation network.

Project Marmary posts large photos of all phases of the dig: the machinery, tunneling, dredging, and the archaeological sites. The picture above came from there. Captions aren't in English, but you can see how difficult the task is.

In the July/August issue of Archaeology Magazine, an article titled "Under Istanbul" emphasizes (of course) the excavation and the finds. The September issue of Wired covers the same story in a very different way. Their article is called "Quake Fears, Ancient Finds have Europe-Asia Tunnel in Non-stop Delay,"

I found a slightly article dated in listing many other sites where subway construction uncovered ancient treasures, such as:

• Athens, Greece, where new metro lines were needed before the 2004 Olympics. Some of the 30,000 artifacts found are on display at the new metro stations.
• Mexico city, where an Aztec neighborhood and a colonial-era home were unearthed during subway construction in the 1990s.
• Los Angeles and North Hollywood, California, where workers discovered thousands of fossils dating back 16 million years. (for more info on that, read the PDF report: "Fossil finds in the Los Angeles Subway")

Paris and Lyons in France, Rome, Naples, Vienna, New York, Sofia (Bulgaria), Amsterdam. . . . There's usually a reason that big towns have grown up in a site. They have ports or sit on rivers, for example. The places have been primo real estate for thousands of years, so it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that digging down a few meters exposes the garbage or temple of an earlier settlement.