![]() ![]() Today Medusa, with her snake hair and stare that turns people to stone, endures as an allegorical figure of fatal beauty, or a ready image for superimposing the face of a detested woman in power. Her writhing hair of serpents became wild curls, with maybe a couple of serpents beneath her chin to hint at her more bestial origins. By the fifth century BCE, that figure from Greek myth began to morph into an alluring seductress, shaped by the idealization of the body in Greek art. The earliest portrayals of Medusa show a grotesque part human, part animal creature with wings and boar-like tusks. ![]() ![]() A Turkish newspaper writes that the ancient spot, often called the Sunken Palace or the Basilica Cistern, is drawing attention from filmmakers around the world as a potential movie set-and it was already used in the 1963 Bond film From Russia with Love.Chariot pole finial with the head of Medusa (detail) (Roman, Imperial, 1st–2nd century CE), bronze, silver, and copper, height: 7 1/4 inches, width: 7 inches diameter: 4 1/4 inches (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Rogers Fund, 1918) While The Guardian writes that the upside-down head is “proof that Byzantine builders saw Roman relics as little more than reusable rubble,” other historians point to the early Christian practice of putting pagan statues upside-down to make a bold statement about their faith.īut no matter why they’re there, the mysterious Medusa heads are a sight to behold. The heads may have been removed from an ancient building called the Forum of Constantine, where similar ones have been found. Several competing theories explain why one of the Medusa heads is sideways at the base of a column and the other is completely upside-down. Today, the place is still dark, damp and a little spooky, although wooden platforms now help visitors walk inside. An enormous space- roughly the size of two football fields-contains a forest of 336 marble columns holding up the vaulted ceilings, and once held 100,000 tons of water. The heads are perhaps the most striking sight in the cistern, whose dark passages were cleaned out in 1985, when the city removed dirty water and tons of mud. Many versions of the story say that her severed head, which could turn you to stone if you looked at it, became part of the shield Athena carried. Because she was the only mortal among the three Gorgons, her killer, Perseus, was able to slay her by cutting off her head. In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of the Gorgon monsters, usually depicted with wings-and, of course, a head of snakes. But the incredible structure wasn’t fit for visitors for some time: during the Ottoman Empire, the cistern contained junk- and corpses. ![]() In 1545, he found the secret: a gigantic subterranean cistern, beautifully carved and replete with the Medusas pictured above. He’d heard strange stories of locals drawing up water-and even fish-from their basements, and set out to discover what lurked beneath. Built in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian as a place to store fresh water for his palace and nearby buildings, the reservoir was rediscovered a thousand years later when a scholar named Petrus Gyllius visited what was then Constantinople. She’ll turn you to stone-or, okay, maybe she won’t this time, but the power of Medusa still emanates from two giant, snake-covered heads in an underground reservoir in Istanbul. ![]()
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