Message #69078

[Krystal Coenen]

The aqueduct stands in Istanbul, in the quarter of Fatih, and spans the valley between the hills occupied today by the Istanbul University and the Mosque of Fatih. The surviving section is 921 meters long, about 50 meters less than the original length.[1] The Atatürk Bulvarı highway passes under its arches.

The construction of a water supply system for the city (then still called Byzantium) had begun already under Emperor Hadrian.[2] Under Constantine I, when the city was rebuilt and increased in size, the system needed to be greatly expanded to meet the needs of the rapidly growing population.[3]

The Valens aqueduct, which originally got its water from the slopes of the hills between Kağıthane and the Sea of Marmara,[4] was merely one of the terminal points of this new wide system of aqueducts and canals - which eventually reached over 250 km in total length, the longest such system of Antiquity - that stretched throughout the hill-country of Thrace and provided the capital with water. Once in the city, the water was stored in three open reservoirs and over a hundred underground cisterns, such as the Basilica Cistern, with a total capacity of over 1 million cubic meters.[5]

The exact date that construction on the aqueduct began is uncertain, but it was completed in the year 368 during the reign of Emperor Valens, whose name it bears. It lay along the valley between the third and fourth hills of Constantinople, occupied respectively at that time by the Capitolium and the Church of the Holy Apostles.[6] According to tradition, the aqueduct was built using the stones of the walls of Chalcedon, pulled down as punishment in 366 after the revolt of Procopius.[6] The structure was inaugurated in the year 373 by the urban prefect Klearchos, who commissioned a Nymphaeum Maius in the Forum of Theodosius, that was supplied with water from the aqueduct.[6]a[›]

After a severe drought in 382, Theodosius I built a new line (the Aquaeductus Theodosiacus), which got water from the northeastern region known today as Belgrade Forest.[3] Other works were executed under Theodosius II, who decided to distribute the water of the aqueduct exclusively to the Nymphaeum, the Baths and the imperial palace.[3] The aqueduct, possibly damaged by an earthquake, was restored under Emperor Justinian I, who connected it with the Cistern of the Basilica of Illusb[›] (identified today either with the Yerebatan or with the Binbirdirek (Turkish: "thousand and one columns") cistern, and was finally repaired in 576 by Justin II, who built a separated pipe.[6] [7]

The aqueduct was cut by the Avars during the siege of 626, and the water supply was reestablished only after the great drought of 758 by Emperor Constantine V.[6] The Emperor had the whole water supply system repaired by a certain Patrikios, who used a large labour force coming from the whole of Greece and Anatolia.[6]

Other maintenance works were accomplished under Emperors Basil II (in 1019) and Romanos III Argyros.[8] [4]

The last Byzantine Emperor who took care of the aqueduct was Andronikos I Komnenos.[7] Neither during the Latin Empire nor during the Palaiologan age were any repair works executed, but by that time the population of the city had shrunk to about 40,000 - 50,000 inhabitants, so that the water supply was not a very important issue anymore.[4] Nevertheless, according to Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, a Castilian diplomat who traveled to Constantinople en route to an embassy to Timur in 1403, the aqueduct was still functioning.