Four giant granite columns carry the Süleymaniye's dome arches. One came from Egypt, one from Baalbek, two from Istanbul itself. All four were second-hand.
There's a word for it: spolia. The Ottomans reused old stone mostly for practical reasons, mostly from ruins, rarely from standing buildings.
After 1453 the ruins of Constantinople became a quarry. The first Fatih Mosque, begun in 1463, rose on the Church of the Holy Apostles, whose columns, marbles and some imperial sarcophagi were reused. Chronicles say the architect, Atik Sinan, cut down two huge columns that were too long, and Mehmed II punished him.
Bayezid II built his complex (1500–06) on the Forum of Theodosius and demolished the Column of Theodosius for material.
For the Süleymaniye (1550–57), architects scoured the empire for old marble. Gyllius, a French traveller, saw marble of many kinds lying on site and wrote that seventeen white columns on the Hippodrome had just come down for it. Only Western travellers say so.
So why is Rome so hard to spot? Because the builders chiselled. Reliefs and inscriptions were usually erased or reworked, so without written records a stone's origin is almost impossible to tell.
The twist: perhaps the most famous Ottoman-era spolia, one scholar says, survived because nobody chiselled it. Eighteen relief fragments from the Column of Theodosius turned up in the foundations of the Bayezid Hamam, never reworked.
And "Rome" isn't only Rome. After conquering Egypt, Selim I stripped coloured marble and columns from Cairo and sent them to Istanbul as victory symbols.
Two stops, early morning. In the Süleymaniye, between prayers, find the four granite columns. Then Beyazıt: walk the Bayezid II courtyard, count the porphyry and verd antique, and ask where the Theodosius fragments are shown; our sources disagree.
