From the Chalke Gate to the Makrona and District of the Guards: A Reinterpretation of the Mamboury and Wiegand Survey of the Upper Great Palace

This article addresses the question of the archaeological record for the Byzantine Great Palace (Μέγα Παλάτιον). Discussions about the topography of the Great Palace have relied to a large extent upon the evidence supplied by the drawings and archaeological analysis of the surveys of its site in the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul by a team from the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Berlin, led by its then-director Theodor Wiegand, and documented through the exceptional drawings of the Belgian-born amateur archaeologist, travel writer and delineator, Ernest Mamboury. Given their apparent verisimilitude, the veracity of these drawings has not heretofore been questioned. However it is proposed that reconciling them with accurate topographical data, and three-dimensional modeling both reveals their errors and inconsistencies, while offering up new information on the configuration of the archaeological features. The study focuses upon the DAI area B, the district of the palace guards.