Yılanlı Sütun - Free Audio Guide

The Yılanlı Sütun, commonly known in English as the Serpent Column, is an ancient bronze monument originally fashioned to commemorate the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea around 479 BCE. Crafted from war spoils and first dedicated at Delphi, the work consisted of intertwined serpents that once supported a now‑lost golden tripod and bore inscriptions recording the names of participating Greek city‑states. In the early fourth century CE Constantine transferred the column to Constantinople’s Hippodrome, where it became part of the imperial ceremonial landscape. Centuries of exposure and human intervention have broken and dispersed upper elements, but the surviving fragment in Istanbul remains a powerful testament to antiquity and to the successive Byzantine and Ottoman layers of the city’s history. Located in the open‑air Hippodrome (At Meydanı), it holds rich cultural significance as a shared and contested emblem of collective memory and artistic craftsmanship.