Mary Adelaide Walker

Mary Adelaide Walker (c. 1820 - 1905) was a British traveler who spent thirty years in Istanbul and the eastern world documenting her experiences in travel books, drawings, and paintings.  This drawing by Walker is of the Boukoleon Palace - a fifth century Byzantine Palace southwest of the Hippodrome that was already in ruins when Mehmed II took the city in 1453.  Rather than tear down Byzantine structures, Mehmed opted to maintain them in a gesture that linked himself to the greatness of the former Empire.  Walker’s image of the ruins must have been drawn prior to the early 1870s, when the west side of the structure was destroyed to make way for the Sirkeci railway.  While the lion depicted here was lost to the site with the partial destruction, it remains - along with another lion from the ruins - in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul.  In 2018, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality announced plans to turn the ruins into an open-air museum, though these plans appear to have been halted thus far.