Chalcedon - Megarian Colony

Megarian Colony

It was a Megarian colony founded on a site that was viewed at the time as so obviously inferior to that which was within view on the opposite shore (these being the small Lygos and Semistra settlements on Seraglio point), that the Persian general Megabazus is said to have remarked that Chalcedon's founders must have been blind. Indeed, Strabo and Pliny relate that the oracle of Apollo had told the Athenians and Megarians who founded Byzantium to build their city opposite to the blind, and that the story was interpreted to mean Chalcedon, the 'City of the Blind'.

Chalcedon, however, was a flourishing town in which trade thrived. It contained many temples, including one of Apollo, which had an oracle. Chalcedonia, the territory dependent upon Chalcedon, stretched up the Anatolian bank of the Bosphorus at least as far as the temple of Zeus Urius, now the site of Yoros Castle, and may have included the north bank of the Bay of Astacus which extends towards Nicomedia. Important villages in Chalcedonia included Chrysopolis (the modern Üsküdar) and Panteicheion (Pendik). Strabo notes that "a little above the sea" in Chalcedonia, there lies "the fountain Azaritia, which contains small crocodiles."

In its early history it shared the fortunes of Byzantium, was taken by the satrap Otanes, vacillated long between the Lacedaemonian and the Athenian interests. Darius' bridge of boats, built in 512 BC for the Scythian campaign, extended from Chalcedonia to Thrace. Chalcedon was included within the kingdom of Bithynia, whose king Nicomedes willed Bithynia to the Romans upon his death in 74 BC.