16 stories set here.
In late May 526, during the crowds of Ascension week, an earthquake levelled Antioch — then among the greatest cities of the Roman East — and the fire that followed burned most of what stood. The chroniclers' toll of 250,000 is likely inflated but marks a catastrophe of extraordinary scale. The patriarch died; his successor was chosen from the rubble.
Read the story →On a July night in 356 BC a man named Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders — and confessed under torture that he had done it purely to make his name immortal. The Ephesians executed him and made speaking his name a capital offence. It didn't work: one historian wrote it down, and the arsonist got exactly what he wanted.
Read the story →The Ottoman government deported the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia eastward into the Syrian desert from April 1915. Approximately one million Armenians died in the marches, the concentration camps along the Euphrates, or in direct massacres. The killing was organised by the Ottoman Special Organisation under the cabinet of the Committee of Union and Progress. The Turkish Republic has not, as of 2026, formally acknowledged the killings as genocide.
Read the story →Theodora was the daughter of a Constantinople circus bear-keeper. By approximately 522 she had been a stage performer and possibly a sex worker. In 525 she married the future emperor Justinian over imperial-court opposition. In January 532, when the Nika riots threatened to overthrow the imperial government, she persuaded Justinian to stay and fight with a speech preserved by Procopius: "The purple is the noblest shroud."
Read the story →Florence Nightingale arrived at the Scutari military hospital outside Constantinople on 4 November 1854 with 38 trained nurses to handle British casualties from the Crimean War. The death rate from disease in the overcrowded wards was 42 percent. Six months of systematic reform — hand-washing, ventilation, sewer cleaning, nutrition — brought it to 2 percent. Modern nursing dates its institutional origin from this campaign.
Read the story →The Fourth Crusade was contracted in 1201 to invade Egypt. By 1202 the crusaders could not pay for the Venetian fleet they had ordered. They diverted to attack the Christian Byzantine capital at Constantinople, where they installed an Angelid pretender. When he could not pay either, they sacked the city on 12-15 April 1204. The Eastern Orthodox-Catholic schism became permanent.
Read the story →The Plague of Justinian reached Constantinople in spring 542 CE from Egypt and Pelusium. Procopius records a peak mortality of about 5,000 deaths per day in Constantinople. Modern genetic analysis of plague burials at Aschheim in Bavaria confirmed in 2013 that the pathogen was Yersinia pestis — the same bacterium that caused the 14th-century Black Death. The empire-wide death toll is estimated at 25-50 percent of population.
Read the story →Xerxes I of Persia ordered the Hellespont — the strait between Europe and Asia at modern Dardanelles — to be bridged in spring 480 BCE for his invasion of Greece. A storm destroyed the first bridge. Xerxes had the engineers beheaded, ordered the sea given 300 lashes, and had a pair of fetters thrown into the water. The second bridge held.
Read the story →Mehmed II besieged Constantinople from 6 April to 29 May 1453 with a substantial Ottoman army of approximately 80,000 and a previously unknown size of bronze siege cannon — including the 8.2-metre Orban bombard cast specifically for the siege. The walls held for 53 days. They had held for 1,123 years.
Read the story →Theodosius I's edicts of 391 and 392 AD prohibited all pagan religious practice across the Roman Empire and authorised the demolition of pagan temples. The Serapeum of Alexandria was destroyed within months. The legal framework defined the institutional end of Greco-Roman paganism.
Read the story →Strabo of Amaseia wrote the seventeen-book *Geographika* between approximately 20 BC and 23 AD. The work was substantially the last great Hellenistic geographical synthesis. Strabo disagreed with most of Eratosthenes's specific positions on geographical method, but cited him so extensively in the process of disagreeing that Strabo is now the principal surviving source for Eratosthenes's lost work.
Read the story →When the Knights Hospitaller built the Castle of Saint Peter at Bodrum in the early 15th century, they used the marble of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — as quarry stone. The Mausoleum had stood for 1,700 years. The castle stands today.
Read the story →According to Plutarch, Mark Antony stripped the library at Pergamon — the second-largest collection in the Hellenistic world — and gave its 200,000 volumes to Cleopatra. The story is probably exaggerated. The library was certainly emptied.
Read the story →King Mausolus died in 353 BC. His widow built him a tomb so spectacular that for two thousand years every grand tomb in Europe was called by his name.
Read the story →Before Eudoxus, Greek mathematicians could prove statements about simple shapes. Eudoxus invented the method that let them prove statements about curves.
Read the story →In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
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