700-year-old chapel in Istanbul’s historical peninsula used as tire storage
ISTANBUL
A historical chapel, believed to be 700 years old, has been found in the backyard of a tire shop in Istanbul’s Fatih district.
The chapel, a significant part of which is still intact but deplorable due to neglect, is used by a shopkeeper to preserve hundreds of old tires.
Removing the tires and other items in the chapel after seeing reporters, the shopkeeper claimed that the roof constructed with steel pillars on the chapel and the surrounding bricks were built to “protect the historical building.”
“We guarded this place after we got here,” he said.
Historian Süleyman Faruk Göncüoğlu noted that the building is one of the surviving parts of the Moldavian Palace, an eastern Orthodox church erected in the Byzantine era.
“It is of great importance that the ruins exist in terms of establishing a palace that the Ottomans conducted politically in the Balkan region and honored the rulers at some point, which they could not even have in their own region,” Göncüoğlu said.
He stated that the work here is very significant for architecture and history professionals, stressing that the building is also an open laboratory for them.
Referring to the fact that the brick and stone lattice systems of the building can be seen closely, the historian noted that the chapel is an open database for Istanbul city historians.
The palace, whose ruins are used as a tire storage, was used as the Embassy of Moldova, known as Boğdan in Turkish, in the 16th century, however, it was damaged by fire in 1784 and was in ruins during the 19th century.
