page_title: Palace of Antiochos
section_title: Original architecture of the palace
hierarchical_section_title: Palace of Antiochos / Description / Original architecture of the palace
context_page_description: The Palace of Antiochos was an early 5th-century palace in the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. It has been identified with a palatial structure excavated in the 1940s and 1950s close to the Hippodrome of Constantinople, some of whose remains are still visible today. In the 7th century, a part of the palace was converted into the church–more properly a martyrion, a martyr's shrine–of St Euphemia in the Hippodrome, which survived until the Palaiologan period.
context_section_description: The original palace consisted of two sections, a southern and a northern. The southern one, inaccessible to the public today, featured the large apsed hexagonal hall which was later converted into the Church of Saint Euphemia, connected to a wide semicircular portico, some 60 m in diameter and enclosing a courtyard paved with marble. The hexagonal hall originally served probably as a dining hall (triclinium). The diameter of the hall is some 20 m, with each side of the hexagon 10.4 m wide. Each side featured an absidal niche, polygonal on the exterior and semicircular in the interior, each 7.65 m wide and 4.65 m deep, thus providing space for a semicircular bench (sigma or stibadium) and a dining table. Each apse also had a door that communicated with small circular rooms, situated between the apses. A marble pool was located in the center of the hall, a feature common in Late Antiquity. The hexagonal triclinium was flanked by other rooms, grouped along the outer curve of the great portico, including an elaborate vestibule with a circular room at its center.
  The northern section, located between the street that ran along the western wall of the Hippodrome and the Mese thoroughfare, was until recently misidentified as the Palace of Lausus. It comprised a large rotunda of 20 m diameter with niches on the wall, which seems to have functioned as an audience hall for Antiochos. It was attached to a south-eastwards facing, C-shaped portico open to the street along the Hippodrome. A small bath house, also accessible from the street, lay next to the southern side of the portico. In the 5th century, when the palace was imperial property, an elongated hallway was added to the rotunda in the west, accessed through a double-apsed vestibule. Its shape points to its use as a triclinium. It was 52.5 m  long and 12.4 m wide with an apse at its end, while in the 6th century, six apses were added on each of its long sides.
caption: Outline of the Palace of Antiochos.
exif: {}