Basilica Palace Mosaics

When the Grand Palace was renovated , Justinian I (527-565) covered the hall floor with a magnificent decorative pavement, according to pottery discovered in the earth infill beneath the mosaic. Houses were constructed on the three lower terraces on the western slope all the way down to the coast, expanding the palace district. On the middle terrace, which is above the palace harbor and close to the Golden Triclinium, the primary structures and imperial residences were relocated.

The Great Palace Mosaic in Istanbul is the largest and finest tessellated floor we can locate from antiquity. The only reference we have to the furniture of the Imperial Palace of Constantinople comes from this singular masterwork. The mosaicist skill, with roots in Anatolia and aesthetic refinement in Greece and Italy, was able to draw on a long-standing tradition at the time it was created. These magnificently adorned floors were laid by the best artists the Empire had to offer. Yet, it is challenging to interpret and date the mosaic purely on the basis of typological and stylistic criteria in the absence of comparable works. The mosaic floor was composed of three layers: the bottom layer was a thick bed of packed quarrystone (statumen) that was 0.30 to 0.50 meters thick, followed by a mortar screed that was 9 cm thick, a layer of compacted insulating loam, soil, and charcoal, and a layer of hard screed that contained a high percentage of stone chips (rudus), which in turn supported the embedding mortar and tesserae (nucleus).

Just around 250 square meters of the floor, or about one seventh or one eighth of the original area, remained in the south-western, north-western, and north-eastern halls of the peristylar court due to destruction and various modifications during Justinian I's reign. Despite being in pieces, the mosaic's excavated pieces are enough to convey the splendor typical of early Byzantine palaces. An exceptional view of the technical, aesthetic, and iconographic elements of the tessellated pavement may be found in the continuous stretch of the north-eastern hall, which was left in place after a successful restoration.