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p. 17 Written sources for the long reign of Justinian reveal continuing activity on the aqueducts and cisterns, but more especially provide crucial details about specific features of the system within and outside the city. After the disastrous fire following the Nika riot in 532, a number of major buildings were rebuilt, including the Haghia Sophia, and according to the Chronicon Paschale, ‘he [Justinian] built inside the palace bakeries and granaries for the storage of grain; likewise too a cistern for water in case of popular crises’. (…) The construction of the Basilica Cistern, now the Yerebatan Sarayi, reveals a great deal about the water supply and distribution within the city. Located beneath a public building, it reveals some of the problems of acquiring a large public space in the crowded eastern end of the city. If the start of the work in 526 is correct, the project was possibly not completed until 541 when Malalas records that the city prefect Longinus repaved the open courtyard and constructed the colonnades. Malalas and the Chronicon Paschale also record that the cistern was filled by the aqueduct of Hadrian, noting as well that Justinian also rebuilt the city’s aqueduct.
p. 114 Thus regarding the Yerebatan Sarayi (Justinian’s Basilica Cistern)… To which may be added Gilles’ comments about the same cistern, ‘There is an abundance of wells that empty into the Cistern… This Cistern stands west of the Church of St Sophia a distance of eighty Roman paces’.
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