ISTANBUL, Turkey – It seems a typical scene of urban decay: abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, trash and broken wine bottles.
Yet it’s more than 1,500 years old. Engineers uncovered these ruins of an ancient Byzantine port during drilling for a huge underground rail tunnel.
Like Romans, Athenians and residents of other great historic cities, the people of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up something important.
But the ancient port uncovered last November in the Yenikapi neighborhood is of a different scale: It has grown into the largest archaeological dig in Istanbul’s history, and the port’s extent is only now being revealed.