The Mosaic Museum

Images | Travel accounts and articles | The Great Palace

Amazon. Istanbul, The Great Palace Mosaic: The Story of its Exploration, Preservation and Exhibition 1983-1997 by Werner Jobst, Behçet Erdal and Christian Gurtner. I haven't read this book. It is, apparently, a trilingual (Turkish, English, German). It's probably more in the way of a guidebook, rather than an interpretive monograph.

Images (of course there are images on other pages)

Twenty photographs by D. G. Mootz, apparently before much of it was cleaned. From an association of history teachers from New South Wales.

Four shots of the mosaics by Tom Alexander, from a Sea Launch trip to Istanbul (Sea Launch launches satelites from modified oil platforms).

Three images from the mosaic from "Recueil d'Images Relatives aux Croisades et � l'Histoire Byzantine." (Are they really relevant to that, though?)

Travel accounts and articles

Lauren and Sonia's travel journal. They were impressed. Intended for a middle-school audience, perhaps, as the page goes with a middle school trip page.

Brief blurb with a nice shot of the snake-and-eagle mosaic. The author is unknown, as the superstructure has largely been dismantled.

A picture of the restoration from John Malathronas' 1996 travelogue.

Igougo (I go, you go) journal entry describes the museum.

Larry Stillman appealing travelogue. On the mosaics:

"The eagle and snake in a fatal embrace is striking (and a theme taken up throughout history - eg in the US). There are also fragments and depictions of all sorts of mythological scenes that would have been immediately apparent to the viewers."

Article by Haldun Ayd�ng�n from Turkish Airline's English-language periodical Skylife. The author has a very impressive collection of stock photography of ancient cities in Turkey online.

Official page found all over the web. This is the Turkish Ministry of Culture's version. Here's a mirror.

The Great Palace

The Great Palace including many pictures, some discussion of the mosaics and an academic bibliography. From Robert Ousterhout's excellent Welcome to Constantinople page. Ousterhout's page has an enthusiast's air to it, but he's a professer of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Byzantine Lamellar Armour: Conjectural Reconstruction of a Find from the Great Palace in Istanbul, Based on Early Medieval Parallels" by Peter Beatson. This is obviously a hobby-article, but not necessarily uninformed because of it.