Serpent Column - Current Status

Current Status

Pausanias informs us that roughly a hundred years later, the Phoceans used the golden tripod to fund their military during the holy war involving the Oracle of Delphi. Constantine the Great moved the Serpent Column to Constantinople to decorate the spina (central line) of the Hippodrome of Constantinople, where it still stands today.

The top of the column was adorned with a golden bowl supported by three serpent heads. The bowl was destroyed or stolen during the Fourth Crusade. Many Ottoman miniatures show the serpent heads were intact in the early decades following the Turkish conquest of the city.

Ahmed Bican, from Gallipoli, has given a short description of the Column in his Dürr-i Meknûn, written around the time of the Fall of Constantinople. He states that it is a hollow bronze of intertwined snakes, threeheaded, a talisman for the citizens against snake bites.

Between fifty to one hundred years after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the jaw of one of the three serpent heads was documented missing. There is a most likely apocryphal legend that Mehmed II, shattered it upon entering the city in triumph as its conqueror. Later, at the end of 17th century, all three of the serpent heads were destroyed. Again, although there is legend that a drunken Polish nobleman knocked them off, Nusretname ("The Book of Victories") by Silahdar Findiklili Mehmed Aga relates that the heads simply fell off on the night of October 20, 1700. Parts of the heads were recovered and are on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.