Philadelphion

The Philadelphion was a public square located in Constantinople.

Location

After passing the Forum of Theodosius, the Mese Odos (the main road of Constantinople) branched into two directions. One led to the quarter known today as Yedikule, via the Aksaray and Cerrahpaşa quarters. The other passed through the quarters of Şehzadebaşı and Fatih until reaching the quarter of Edirnekapı (formerly the Gate of Charisius). The space where the road forked was thought to be the physical centre, or ''mesomphalos'', of the city.

History

According to the 8th-century ''Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai'', the site of the later Philadelphion was originally known as the Proteichisma ("fore-wall"), and the site of a gate in the city wall built by Emperor Carus (r. 282–283). Raymond Janin suggested that this Proteichisma was an outer defensive wall protecting the wall erected by Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) during his rebuilding of Byzantium, possibly indicating that the city had already expanded beyond the Severan wall. The ''Parastaseis'' record the presence of statues of Constantine the Great (r. 306–337), his mother Helena, and his sons, seated on thrones, around a large four-sided porphyry column, topped by a gilded cross and marked with the sign of a sponge at the base, as well as statues of Julian the Apostate and his wife, whom the ''Parastaseis'' erroneously records as Anastasia. Perhaps this was a statue of Constantine's sister Anastasia. According to the ''Parastaseis'', the column was erected by Constantine to commemorate his having a heavenly vision of the cross at the site; modern scholarship however considers the monument complex to be of later date, commemorating the finding of the True Cross by Helena. The ''Patria of Constantinople'' furthermore records that statues of two sons of Constantine seated on thrones stood opposite from the column. These statues apparently survived until the early 15th century, when they were popularly known as the "True Judges".

The ''Parastaseis'' records that the place received the name Philadelphion ("place of brotherly love") from a statue group showing the meeting of Constantine's three sons there after Constantine's death in 337 and their embrace as a sign of mutual devotion and support. The event never actually took place—Constantine's sons only met briefly in Pannonia after his death—but the statue probably existed, similar to another three-headed statue of Constantine and two of his sons, Constans and Constantius, which the ''Parastaseis'' record as lost at sea at the time of Theodosius II (r. 402–450), symbolizing concord in the imperial family. In 1958, P. Verzone identified the statue groups known as the "Tetrarchs", which was plundered during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, brought to Venice, and incorporated into the St Mark's Basilica, with the statues mentioned in the ''Parastaseis''. This identification was reinforced by the discovery of a missing fragment from the statue group near the Bodrum Mosque, but as the editors of the ''Parastaseis'' point out, "there are too many discrepancies between those groups and ''Parastaseis''s descriptions here to permit any certainty". Given the inaccuracy of the historical details in the ''Parastaseis'', it is possible that even the identification with Constantine's sons is wrong, while it is unclear from the phrasing of the text whether this monument survived until the 8th century, or whether it had been destroyed long before.

References

Sources

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External links

Tentative reconstruction of the site at the Byzantium 1200 project

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Constantinople