Tag Archives: Fortress

Day 3 – It’s the fort that counts

4 Replies

Sunday 10 May 2026 – A sunny start to the day: so out on to the hotel restaurant’s veranda to take in the view.

Then our group congregated and, as yesterday, trooped down the road to be collected by Mostafa in his bus, and we set off towards the southern coastal side of Istanbul for our first visit of the day, which was to Yedikule Fortress. As you might infer from the name, this is part of  Constantinople’s formidable fortifications. Built in 1458 by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II after he conquered the city, the seven-tower complex was created by adding three new towers and fully enclosing a section of the ancient walls of Constantinople. Those walls were built in the 5th century AD during the reign of Roman Emperor Theodosius II. At this point I have to confess that I knew nothing of these walls, so much of the day was spent raising my consciousness about them.

First, though, the fortress.  It is the subject of a substantial restoration project whose banner gives a good overview of its shape.

The bottom three circles are the three extra towers; the run of the wall is across the top of the diagram and the two square blocks represent a triumphal entry gate, called the Golden Gate, which was built in the 6th century. This is what the Gate looks like from inside the courtyard of the fortress.

You can clearly see that at one stage there was a massive central arch through which one would triumphally arrive. Over the years it has been successively bricked up to be smaller and smaller, but it must have been hugely imposing in its day. Over the arch are flagstones with holes in them.

and these holes were a puzzle until someone figured out that they were mounting blocks for metal letters. Some further clever thinking deduced what these letters probably were

and thus reconstructed what the text was – “HAEC LOCA THEODOSIUS DECORAT POST FATA TYRANNI”, “Theodosius decorated these places after the downfall of the tyrant.” 

From the other side, the Golden Gate looks like this.

You can see the outline of the original triumphal arch in the centre, and the successively smaller portals inside it. Behind you as you look at the gate from this side is the Little Golden Gate.

This presumably gave extra pith and moment to any processional entry, and, more importantly, was part of a second wall built in support of the main walls into which the Yedikule fortress was incorporated. More on the walls later.

Yedikule became a place of imprisonment and execution. In front of the Little Gate, for example, is a well, down which the bodies would be thrown to be washed away into the Sea of Marmara. There is another well, used for the same purpose, inside one of the towers, which was also used for imprisonment.  

You can see joists and the holes for them which indicate that there were several floors off which were cells in which prisoners could be kept. If they died or were to be executed, the central well was for disposal of the bodies.

Looking carefully round the fortress, one can see a few subversive Christian relics which presumably escaped Ottoman notice:

An early Christian cross, variant of the chi-rho
A chi-rho construct – Greek CH and R characters to symbolise Christ

Even a Roman eagle survived.

We climbed up inside the Golden Gate and were presented with a great view over the courtyard of the fortress

and, incidentally, an oversight of the huge queue of shipping waiting to be allowed up the Bosphorus. 

The viewpoint at the top of the gate allowed us to get some idea of how the walls were designed.

To the left you can see the main walls. From there, a terrace leads to a second wall, then another terrace and then a ditch, which was the moat, itself defended by a crenelated wall. It’s interesting to see that the locals use the moat these days as market gardens or allotments.

This very daunting double-walled construction was built during the reign of Theodosius II, and hence it’s called the Theodosian Walls. They ran some 4 miles, north from the Sea of Marmara up to the Golden Horn inlet, thus forming a massive land wall which, together with the existing sea walls, formed a protective cordon around the city  that successfully defended the whole of the Constantinople peninsula from incursion by land or sea for over a thousand years. Eventually, in the 15th century, the Ottomans found a weak point where a river ran through the Theodosian Walls and used it as one of the tactics to be able to invade the city. 

The walls, therefore, were critical to the enduring success of Constantinople as the centre of power for the region. The Land Walls was (were?) a huge construction project.  The main walls were 4.5 – 6m thick and 12m high. Their construction included bands of bricks, a technique  which strengthens the construction and, importantly for this region, makes it more resistant to earthquakes. The technique was also used in constructions in Britain, such as the Roman walls of Colchester, London and St. Albans.

Not that swallows care a jot for this architectural feat – they just use the wall for nests, and we could see and hear them whizzing about shouting at each other and catching insects – a joyful phenomenon.

96 towers were included along the length of the wall. We could see some of them from our viewpoint at the top of the Golden Gate,

and indeed, after we left the Yedikule fortress and travelled northwards beside the walls, we could see the amazing extent of these walls.  Some sections were in disrepair, some have had some repair and/or restoration work done and some have been almost excessively reconstructed.

Our wallside drive took us almost to the northernmost extent of the walls, within a kilometre or so of the Golden Horn. In order to get near our next destination, we had a traffic interaction which is pretty typical of Istanbul. First, Mostafa had to squeeze us past a crane

and then

he did a splendid job of (a) navigating the bus along an extremely narrow road without damaging bus, cars or buildings, and (b) facing down any drivers who had the temerity to want to come in the opposite direction.  Whilst all this was going on, a chap by the roadside was calmly filleting and selling fish from a makeshift stall.

Once Mostafa had found a place where we could safely debus, we walked a little way to visit the Tekfur Sarayı museum, which is housed behind the remaining façade of a 13th-century palace built for the son of a Byzantine Emperor. The place had fallen into extreme disrepair, and reconstruction work enabled it to be opened as a museum as late as 2021. It’s a handsome façade.

If you look the place up on Google Maps, it labels it in English as the “Palace of the Porphyrogenitus”. Some sources translate Porphyrogenitus as merely “Sovereign”, but it literally means “Born to the Purple”, indicating a child born to a reigning emperor. 

The place served as a palace in the final years of the Byzantine Empire, but suffered severe damage due its proximity to the walls during the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. In subsequent times it served multiple purposes: housing for the Sultan’s menagerie; a brothel; and, in the early 18th century, a pottery workshop producing ceramic tiles in a style similar to that of İznik tiles, but influenced by European designs and colours. The museum has exhibits on a couple of floors and one floor is given over to this tiling work, with some striking and colourful displays.

There are some decent views of parts of the city – or would have been had the visibility not suffered from Istanbul’s rather typical haziness – and we also had fun watching a pigeon market, where roller pigeons were being bought and sold.

On the ground floor of the museum is a marvellous model of the Theodosian Walls, as viewed from the south, the Sea of Marmara end.

You can see the Yedikule fortress here in the context of the walls, and the model is a faithful recreation of their extent.

After the museum visit, it was time for lunch, so we walked back up to a road where Mostafa was able to pick us up more easily, and headed to the Fatih neighbourhood of Istanbul.

The restaurant was a bit of a distance from where Mostafa could get the bus, and so we walked through the neighbourhood, which, like so many in Istanbul, has a very colourful and diverse array of shops. 

The lunch was at a Maltese restaurant called Esnaf Lokantasi, very much a family-run locals’ eatery.  The main courses were served from pots at the counter

and very delicious and filling they were, too, with offerings such as stuffed peppers, moussaka, meatballs and so on. For those of us who wanted a bathroom break, Seçkin gently suggested that the toilets by the local mosque would be more gemütlich, and so some of us went back down the street to the Fatih Mosque

beside which were some decent loos. This mosque is culturally quite significant, something which I think Jim and Seçkin missed a trick in not explaining it to us at the time. It’s known as the Conqueror’s Mosque, named after the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (known in Turkish as Fatih Sultan Mehmed), the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453. A mosque was symbolically constructed here, because it was the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles, which Mehmed demolished, symbolising the ousting of Christianity by Islam. The original mosque was seriously damaged in the 1766 earthquake and rebuilt in 1771 to a different design, which one sees today. 

Our last stop of the day was a visit to Kariye Mosque, or the Chora Church. Once again we had a bit of a walk to get from bus to mosque, and it was lovely to see a chap leading his donkey towards the mosque ahead of us.

The mosque itself

was a Byzantine church and has been converted to a mosque. Twice, actually. Much of the fabric of the church dates from the 11th century, and it has suffered earthquake damage followed by rebuilding work, completed in the 14th century.  In the 16th century, during the Ottoman era, it was converted into a mosque; it became a museum in 1945, and was turned back into a mosque in 2020 by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The sad bit starts with this: the church was endowed with some very fine frescoes and mosaics. When it was converted into a mosque, these were covered by a layer of plaster, as Islam prohibits iconic images. The uplifting bit is this: when the mosque was secularised and turned into a museum, restoration work was able to uncover many of the frescoes and mosaics, and these are visible in the building today. They are in a sort of church section; deeper inside is the mosque section (what was the naos – nave – of the church), where, of course, these are not allowed to be visible.

What’s there is quite impressive. It’s actually quite small inside and gets easily crowded, so getting photos wasn’t perfectly straightforward

but here are a few of the ones I took.

The mosque section is, unsurprisingly, much plainer,

although there is one surprise. If you stand in this area and turn round to look behind you, you see, on the wall above the entrance, this:

this is the mosaic of a scene known as “The Dormition of the Virgin”, and the surprising thing is that it’s visible at all, given the Islam proscription of This Kind Of Thing. It’s a lovely mosaic, and wonderful that it is complete and has been allowed to stay visible. 

The mosaics in the church part are in many cases incomplete.

so it’s uplifting to see the results of the restoration work, but sad to reflect on the destruction of so much beautiful work. Our visit to the painted monasteries of Romania had shown us how magnificent these works can be, and so our pleasure at seeing the frescoes was mixed with sadness about the damage that had been inflicted.

The music of Stravinsky should be playing in the background here. He wrote his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (sort of his take on Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos) for the wealthy patrons who created Dumbarton Oaks as a centre for Byzantine studies affiliated with Harvard University, and Dumbarton Oaks played a major role in the launching of the restoration programme for the Chora Church.

And that was it for the day. We were free to find our own dinner, but actually just retired to rest and drink Earl Grey in our room and ponder on what we’d seen for the day. There was one diversion, for an attempt at a specific photographic project, but it failed dramatically. I’ll tell you all about it in the next post, so you’ll just have to contain your souls in patience, won’t you?

 

Day 10 – San Quirico d’Orcia to Castiglione d’Orcia – short but sharp

5 Replies

Friday 23 May 2025 – Despite the short distance we had to walk today – 10km is the official distance – we still found ourselves up and ready to depart by 8am. I had looked at the profile of the walk offered by the S-cape app

and formed the opinion that it should be really quite easy, with only gentle ups and downs.

Wrongly, as it turned out. I should instead have looked at the representation offered by Garmin Connect for the same track,

which gives a far better impression of what the day will bring.

Anyhoo…

The breakfast arrangements for our B&B took the form of a voucher to be used at L’Officina del Gusto (The Office of Taste), which had interesting decor

but a limited selection of breakfasts: sweet or savoury. As we continued on our route, the weather looked a trifle ominous

and the various weather apps suggested that there was a real possibility of rain.  However, none materialised and the morning was cooler than we’d experienced before on this walk. We soon left the tarmac for a dirt road, with the usual offering of great scenery.

As we walked along, Jane and I agreed that the Via Francigena was better than the Camino Francés for scenery, but the Camino offered much better infrastructure, particularly rest stops. I guess if you want the scenery, you have to be prepared to walk up the hills.

We passed a few frog ponds,

which were all as noisy as the first one we’d seen a couple of days ago. It struck me that you don’t get that kind of racket in frog ponds in the UK, but I’m not an expert in country ways. Jane, however, has roots in the countryside and she agreed that frogs in the UK weren’t that noisy. Perhaps it’s because these are Italian frogs? We’ve noticed that Italians in groups and silence are to a large extent mutually exclusive.*

A large lump hove into view,

giving us the opportunity to disagree on exactly what it was. Jane thought it might be Radicofani, and I thought it might be Ripa d’Orcia. We were both well wrong, but we did find out eventually what it was. (That’s the bait to keep you reading, which is a bit pathetic, really, but this is the level to which I’ve sunk.)

We knew that there were a couple of interesting stops on the way, and we soon saw the first,

the roofs (rooves?) of Vignoni Alto, described as “one of the best-preserved fortified villages in Tuscany”. Our route led us through it, and it is indeed a very attractive place; we think it’s mainly holiday apartments to let.

Some of the apartments have a simply staggering view.

It was very quiet and therefore too good an opportunity for aerial photography to miss out on.

The road from there leads down

and down and down; it’s a dirt road, but one with signs for motorists warning them that it’s a dangerous slope. We were still fairly high on the road when we realised what the lump was.

It was Rocca di Tentennano (sometimes called Rocca di Castiglione); the reason we rumbled this was that it had been hiding Castiglione d’Orcia behind its bulk and we could now see that we were in for a bit of a climb to get to our destination for the day. However, before we could start the ascent, we had to complete the descent, which led past the other point of interest of the day – Bagno Vignoni, a thermal spa.

While it was always going to be interesting to see the baths, the main thing for me was the presence there of a coffee stop.

It was a popular stop and there were a many cyclists there as well as pellegrinos and a few posh-looking people in civvies – there’s an upmarket hotel attached to the spa. You can tell because the inevitable cypresses are manicured to within an inch of their lives.

It’s an attractive setting.

and we enjoyed looking around it almost as much as we enjoyed the coffee and (very good) filled croissants that were on offer.

The Via route after that continues down and has to cross a river at its lowest point. In theory, there’s a pedestrian bridge across it

but it’s closed; they really don’t want you to use it.

We therefore walked around the road and started the ascent. This is where I realised how much I had misread the profile diagram. Bits of it were really steep – 18.6° was the steepest I recorded, and that is 1 in 3. I hastily revised my decision not to use walking poles and we made our way up the slope (it wasn’t all up, but the bits that were up were quite hard going). Of course, the views improved as we ascended.

and we eventually reached Castiglione

which was very pretty

and very full of cyclists.

We found out that our visit had coincided with the Tuscany Trail; some 600 lunatics cyclists completing a 430km ride. I didn’t notice any e-bikes among them….

Castiglione d’Orcia, being a place with a long historical record (first noted in the year 714) has a street layout that doesn’t owe much to common sense, and a street numbering system to match.  Jane did a great job to actually find our B&B, Il Vecchietta, which, it being only about 1.30pm,

was, of course, closed. However, a phone call brought forth someone to let us in, and we were able to hose ourselves down before heading down to the restaurant, Il Cassero, whence the kind person with the keys had come to our aid. We had a Nice Lunch there; very Italian and very affably served. I continued the pasta experiment and will report on it in due course.

After lunch, we had some time before the local Coop opened and we could buy milk for any cups of tea we might plan, and so I took the opportunity to do some more aerial work.

Rocca del Tentennano, which is a fortress. Really, it is.

You can clearly see the castle that gives this place its name

The walk to and from the Coop gave us the chance for some more pictures of the place.

Like Horace Wimp’s girl, it’s small, but veeery pretty.

And so to tomorrow, where we are back to dealing with a long walk, towards Radicofani, which involves a fair bit of uphill work and several fords, so it’s likely to be interesting as well as testing. The arrangements are all very complicated, but All Will Be Revealed in the next post.

 

* Sorry to appear racist, but I couldn’t resist

 

Day 5 – Colle to Monteriggioni – Adventures beside the river

3 Replies

Friday 16 May 2025 – Today was the penultimate day of the first chunk of our walk to Rome. This section ends in Siena, which we should, all other things being equal, reach tomorrow. Today, the target was Monteriggioni. Of the route, our S-cape app rhapsodised once more: “Prepare yourself for one of the most beautiful sections of the Via Francigena, a meditative route…”. “Meditative” could possibly mean “dull”, in that meditation is the best way to work through a boring stretch. Anyway, the route was not dull; but the S-cape app didn’t quite prepare us for the day’s walk with useful information.

Breakfast was only available from 8am, so we got there promptly. The food on offer was perfectly fine – standard Italian hotel breakfast fare, meaning yoghurt, cereals, juices, plentiful bread and pastries, cheese and meats, and a limited selection of fruit. But there was Twining’s finest Earl Grey on offer, which is always a good thing in our books.

We started off on basically the route that I had used to get the milk yesterday, which leads down That Ramp, past a good view over the newer parts of town.

When we got down to the bottom of the ramp, we found that a market had, it seemed, taken over the whole town.

There were stalls everywhere.

The route of the Via Francigena through the outskirts of the town was quite complicated. How those pilgrims managed not to lose their way round all those apartment blocks is a mystery to me because I suppose they didn’t have Google Maps to help them.

We left the town on the road, but soon diverted away from it and found ourselves on a woodland path with the sounds of rushing water to our left. Soon, the source of the sound became clear; the path ran beside the river Elsa.  It was, indeed, a delightful walk, past several attractive cascades

At times we had to cross the river, which The Powers That Be had enabled by rope bridges. Well, rope, anyway.

Some of these crossings were really very interesting – slippery stones (made more slippery by overnight rain) with quite substantial gaps between them – but we made it intact over all the crossings. We felt that some mention might have been made of these crossings in the S-cape app, to prepare us. Some of the bridges were a little less ambitious, mind.

We passed an intriguing memorial stone, which is getting quite overgrown.

The stone is in memoriam Vitalie Michitcin, and carries, translated into Italian, the immortal line penned by Isaac Asimov, the science (fact and) fiction writer, in his Foundation trilogy: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. This made me wonder whether Vitalie’s end came about through domestic violence. I can’t find any references to explain it in more detail, I’m afraid.

The path was clear, albeit muddy and slippery in places, and every so often went steeply up and down, typically with steps chunky enough to put a strain on the knees of your correspondent.

There was a waterfall at the head of the series of cascades

although there was a bit of a torrent above it as the river passed under the road at Gracciano dell’Elsa, where we exited the Parca Fluvial and took up on an opportunity for a coffee stop.  We had only done about 6km, but the excitement level had been quite intense at times.

We left Gracciano on the road, but again soon turned off on to paths of varying quality. We passed an intriguing statue, possibly of a crane,

though it didn’t look robust enough actually to lift anything. We also passed what was once an ancient Etruscan thermal bath

which was allegedly downstream from a mill, but no sign could be seen of that.

Mostly, the path was OK, and the countryside very pleasant.

Every so often, though, it turned feral

and showed evidence that mountain bikers made use of it,

though, frankly, how they managed MTBs on some of the stretches is beyond me.

These were rocky, steep and slippery in places – another aspect that the rhapsodising S-cape app had failed to prepare us for.

One thing it had prepared us for was a viewpoint that gave us our first sight of Monteriggioni. And it’s quite an arresting sight.

Our walk today would not take us quite all the way there, but we shall walk through it tomorrow as we follow the Via Francigena. By this stage we had reached a small place called Abbadia a Isola, a curious little place, with some old buildings which used once to belong to an Abbey.

We looked into the church, which was simple

but which had some nice frescoes, some possibly reaching as far back as the 16th century.

It has to be said, though, that our main object of interest was a restaurant our information gave us to believe was on the site. Since the time was approaching 2pm by this stage, we decided we should lunch here if possible, as leaving it until we reached our hotel might be too late.

We stumbled around a bit and eventually found the restaurant. It’s called Futura, and it’s a bizarre sort of place. The food we had was delicious, but the decor is very strange, with weird modernistic pictures on the walls.

Very odd decor in the loo

The service we had was very courteous and professional, but also somehow pretentious. Its website proclaims “Our Italian Cuisine of Tomorrow”, which definitely sounds pretentious to me. Jane and I don’t drink wine any more, preferring gin-and-tonic to go with meals, so I asked our friendly but po-faced host if he had gin. He said yes, so we asked for gin and tonics. Alas, he said, they had no tonic. One wonders what sort of thinking drives an organisation to be able to provide gin but not tonic. If that’s Italian Cuisine Of Tomorrow, I want no part of it. So, although the food really was very good, it didn’t count as a Nice Lunch, which is a bit of a shame.

All that remained of the day’s walk was to get to our hotel, Il Piccolo Castello, which is quite posh.

We discovered that, in taking lunch, we’d made a tactical error, as our arrangement for the hotel was half board. We certainly didn’t want dinner as well as the lunch we’d just eaten, so Jane negotiated with Bianca, the very helpful lady on reception, who got her boss to agree that we could take a picnic lunch with us tomorrow instead.

Since we were less than 2km from the very intriguiing-looking Monteriggioni, we thought it would be worth exploring. Bianca told us that a taxi would have to come from Siena and cost a fortune, but arranged for someone to take us there in the hotel minibus, which was very helpful of her. Accordingly, we were deposited just outside the walls and made our way in through the imposing gate.

Jane had worked out that Monteriggioni is quite small, but it’s actually tiny – it’s really just a fortress, not a town at all. Historically it occupies its undoubtedly strong strategic position as a defense against possible incurson from the dastardly Florentines, so its original purpose was purely military. When we walked in one side of the place, we could actually see right through to the other side.

It’s very photogenic, with an attractive main square with cafes and restaurants, and a lot of small artsanal gift shops.

The church is small but handsome

and quite plain inside.

It’s possible to walk on parts of the walls, which gives a bit of an overview of the place.

This view is taken from the walls above one entry gate, and you can clearly see the gate at the other side

It’s really an open air museum, not a town or village. It’s lovely that it’s been so well preserved, but it somehow feels a bit odd. Anyway, we shall walk through it again tomorrow, once we have climbed the 90 or so metres up the path that leads to it.

This will be the start of a long day, as we will have over 20km to cover – and no coffee stops! As I wrote earlier, reaching Siena will mark the end of this section and we will sadly have to bid farewell to Caroline as she heads back to the UK after what has actually been quite a strenuous week – the route so far has been much tougher than any of us had anticipated.

Anyway, we have to get to Siena first. Wish us luck!