The Hippodrome was the setting for the ceremony which proclaimed Constantinople as the New Rome in a.d. 330, following the division of the Roman Empire, and soon became the civic centre of the Byzantine capital, decorated with imposing monuments and flanked by fine buildings.
There was a ceremony which proclaimed Constantinople as the New Rome in a.d. 330.
For those hoping to go from the sublime to the sinister, the palace prisons, neat and tidy today along their narrow corridor, become all too romantic with their 17th-century Baroque Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri).