Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium

Th is book restores the fountains of Roman Byzantium, Byzantine
Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul, reviving the sounds, shapes,
smells and sights of past water cultures. Constantinople, the capital of
the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, is surrounded on three sides by
sea, and has no major river to deliver clean, potable water. However,
the cultures that thrived in this remarkable waterscape through millennia
have developed and sustained diverse water cultures and a
water delivery system that has supported countless fountains, some
of which survive today. Scholars address the delivery system that conveyed
and stored water, and the fountains, large and small, from which
it gushed. Papers consider spring water, rainwater and seawater; water
suitable for drinking, bathing and baptism; fountains real, imagined
and symbolic. Experts in the history of art and culture, archaeology
and theology, poetry and prose, off er refl ections on water and fountains
across two millennia in one location.