The walls of Anastasios "Thracian Tall", built to protect Istanbul some 1,600 years ago, can still be seen on the Black Sea coast in the Catalca region. The walls of Anastasius are considered the most impressive defensive wall in the world after the Great Wall of China.
Over hundreds of centuries, large and ethnic civilizations built forts and tall, gigantic walls to protect their lands from outside attacks. Among the most famous of these walls are the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall in England, but another wall extends for several kilometers in Istanbul, no less great than these walls, known as the Anastasius Walls.
The Byzantines built the wall about 1,600 years ago on the Black Sea coast in the Catalca district, north of Istanbul, to protect the city from Balkan attacks. For more than a thousand years, the great earth walls built during the reign of Emperor Theodosius protected the city from attacks by the Bulgars from the north.
The origin of the story
Until the beginning of the seventh century the greatest threat to Constantinople came from the lands around the Danube. Nearly half a century after the city was founded by Constantine, Emperor Valens was killed in the Battle of Adrianople (Hadrianapolis) in 378 and the Bulgars defeated Byzantium's land army.
It is therefore not surprising that Emperor Valens' successors launched the project of building walls and military fortresses on the main road to the capital to protect their lands from the north for the next two decades. However, this great attempt was not enough, until the advent of Emperor Anastasius at the beginning of the sixth century AD.
Between 491 and 518 Anastasius ordered the construction of the last great line of defense of Late Antiquity, known as the Wall of Anastasius or the Long Wall of Thrace. Through this wall, which rose as an insurmountable obstacle, stretched across the entire peninsula, fortified settlements such as Silivri, Marmara Ereglisi and Thrace.
Thrace long wall
The long wall of Anastasios was built at the beginning of the sixth century AD, 65 km west of Istanbul (Constantinople), probably to repel the increasing Bulgarian incursions at that time. The wall starts from the Catalca region on the Black Sea coast in the north and ends at the Marmara Sea coast near Silivri.
According to the excavations conducted by the Turkish researcher Feridun Dermetkin, the length of the wall was determined to be 52 kilometers, while other studies said it was 45 kilometers long.
It is this achievement that prompted historians at the time to write: "The greatest achievement that transcended dreams was the construction of a high and strong wall that extended across the whole of Thrace. This wall extends from one sea to another, blocking the path of the barbarians and acting as a barrier against enemy attacks."
An important part of the Anastasios Wall, which was built between 507 and 512 during the Byzantine period, still stands erect as a witness to its history, especially the parts near the shores of Catalca extending to the Black Sea.
Since it was not possible to keep the warriors on the wall of Anastasius, barracks and camps were built behind the walls, one of which was the barracks built and remains of which are still standing near Karacaköy.
Construction technology
In a study conducted over the past fifteen years, maps of the line of the long wall have been drawn, marking the locations of forts, small towers, and the remains of the curtain wall in the dense forest to the north.
According to art historian Khairy Fahmi Yilmaz, who spoke to TRT Haber , the wall was built with a technique called the “chest wall” filled with rubble, stone and mortar used in all the walls, while its thickness ranges from 3 to 4.5 meters, and the height of the remaining parts today is about 5-6 meters, but The height is likely to reach 10 meters in its original form. "We know that this wall has some forts. Some of these zodiac signs were identified in the twentieth century. They were somewhat semi-circular, and bricks were used in them."
Yilmaz noted that they are trying to date the wall based on the materials that were used to build it, and added: "Some parts are older, some parts are later... Until the eleventh century, emperors constantly tried to repair this wall." "The stones of the wall were used in parts of the south as building materials in the neighboring villages, while the wall is better preserved in the forests, where you can walk for kilometers in one direction from this wall in the forest within the borders of Chatalca, especially in an area in and around Karajakoy," he added.
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