Basilica Cistern — Frequently Asked Questions

Yes — personal photography is allowed everywhere on the walkway route, and the amber lighting is designed to be photographed. Keep flash off (it flattens the scene and disturbs other visitors), brace against a railing for the low light, and note that tripods and professional shoots need permission from the operator.

It is cool and humid year-round — a pleasant shock in summer, chilly if you linger. The raised walkways keep you above the water, but surfaces are perpetually damp and the vaults drip. Bring a light layer and wear shoes with grip; you will not get wet beyond the odd drop from the ceiling.

Yes — shoals of carp live in the shallow water and are easy to spot along the darker stretches of walkway. Fish have been kept in the cistern for centuries; Ottoman-era locals catching fish through holes in their basement floors were what led the scholar Petrus Gyllius to rediscover the forgotten cistern in 1545.

Only partially. Entry requires descending 52 stone steps, and there is no visitor elevator, so the cistern is effectively not wheelchair-accessible. Once below, the walkways themselves are flat, railed and wide. Visitors who can manage one long staircase at their own pace generally do fine.

Almost everything in the old city: Hagia Sophia is 150 metres away across the tram street, the Blue Mosque is a five-minute walk across Sultanahmet Square, Topkapı Palace is ten minutes, and the quieter Theodosius Cistern (Şerefiye) is seven minutes along Divan Yolu. Most visitors pair the cistern with Hagia Sophia in a single morning.

Yerebatan is Turkish for "sunken into the earth." The monument's full Turkish name, Yerebatan Sarnıcı, means "the sunken cistern," and locals have long called it Yerebatan Sarayı — "the sunken palace" — for its palatial forest of columns. The English name comes instead from the Stoa Basilica, the great public square that once stood above it.

You descend 52 stone steps to reach the cistern floor, which lies roughly ten metres below street level. The columns rising from the floor are about nine metres tall, so the brick vaults hang just under the modern street. The descent is the only stair work of the visit — once down, the walkways are level.

Today the water is kept deliberately shallow — mostly knee-deep, enough to mirror the columns and cool the air while the raised walkways keep visitors dry. In its working Byzantine life the reservoir could hold water many metres deep: up to about 80,000 cubic metres, submerging most of what you now walk through.

Yes — Sean Connery's Bond rows a boat between its columns in From Russia with Love (1963), filmed on location in Istanbul. The cistern returned to screens in Ron Howard's Inferno (2016) as the setting of the flooded finale. Film buffs will recognise the column forest instantly from the walkway route.