Beneath Istanbul, Archaeologists Explore An Ancient City's Byzantine Basements

Archaeologist Ferudun Ozgumus stands in what is believed to be a Byzantine-era substructure in Istanbul. Nicole Tung/NPR hide caption

The winding streets of old Istanbul are an overlapping cacophony of seagulls, ship horns and vendors of colorful fresh fruit. Shady fig trees cluster near crumbling Byzantine walls and sweeping Ottoman palaces, remnants of the empires that conquered and lost this strategic point on the Bosporus Strait, which formed the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire.

"Can you imagine my excitement when I saw this for the first time?" exclaims archaeologist Ferudun Ozgumus, as he leads the way down a rickety wooden staircase into a cavernous structure deep beneath a carpet shop. "It was full of debris as far as that corner of the arch," he says, pointing across the space to a point 15 feet overhead. "We were crawling!"

For more than 20 years, Ozgumus has knocked on the doors of Istanbul's oldest neighborhoods and asked to see the basement. At 64, the Istanbul University professor is one of the first archaeologists in Turkey devoted to studying the city's underground spaces. He has identified more than 300 sites, and he knows there are hundreds more.

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