Mosaic Museum

Mosaic Museum review

Behind Sultanahmet Mosque and slightly down the hill towards the Marmara is a small, 17th-century shopping street, built to provide rental revenue for the upkeep of the mosque. It has been converted into a cluster of tourist shops, the Arasta Bazaar. Leading off here is a prefabricated hut that is the unlikely home of a fantastic archaeological find. Uncovered in the mid 1950s, it's an ornamental pavement belonging to the Byzantine Great Palace (Büyüksaray), which stood where the mosque is now, and probably dates from the era of Justinian. The surviving segments depict mythological and hunting scenes, with pastoral idylls disturbingly skewed by bloody depictions of animal combat: elephant versus lion, snake versus gazelle, stags and lizards being eaten by winged unicorns. It's also worth a visit for the informative wall panels, particularly the pictorial reconstructions of how the Byzantine palace quarter would have looked.