Victoria and Albert Museum opens exhibition on Constantinople and Istanbul on 7 November 2026

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has at last done what museums usually avoid on administrative grounds: it has placed in a single gallery Byzantine and Ottoman objects that spent a century and a half in different departments.

The exhibition Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires opens on 7 November 2026 and will run until 9 May 2027.

The exhibition's chronology spans 1,600 years, from 330, when Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Roman Empire to a city on the Bosphorus and named it Constantinople, to 1922, when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist. The display is divided into four parts: Roman origins, religious art, imperial power and everyday city life. Among the especially impressive items are the icon of Saint Eudokia, executed in marble and coloured glass inlay and discovered only in 1929, a Byzantine carved casket of the 10th century with pagan subjects, an Ottoman ceremonial scroll, and a painting by an unknown Greek artist of around 1809 showing a scene in a hammam.

The exhibition is a must-see and will undoubtedly remain a hit for a long time.

The curators' central thesis is that the art of the city did not break off after 1453, when the Ottomans took Constantinople, but continued: the craftsmen stayed, and Ottoman objects carry Byzantine skill within them. The exhibition also traces the influence in the opposite direction, when Byzantine and Ottoman motifs found their way in the 19th century into European textiles and interiors through designers such as Owen Jones and William Morris

Report a translation error

Kiel archaeologists link tool reworking in southern Africa to food availability

I have come across an interesting idea about a connection between how intensively the stone tools of early Homo sapiens were reworked and how much food their landscape had to offer. A group of archaeologists from Kiel University studied material from the sites of Florisbad and Lombard's Drift

Archaeologist James Starkey, Finder of the Lachish Letters, Was Killed in 1938 Over a Land Dispute

James Leslie Starkey is known to everyone who has had anything to do with biblical archaeology, and to almost no one outside it. In 1935 he found the "Lachish Letters", potsherds bearing the correspondence of a Judaean garrison on the eve of the Babylonian assault of 588 BC,

British director Catherine Round films taxi drivers of Kamaishi, a city hit by the 2011 tsunami

The Briton Katharine Round has made a documentary about Kamaishi, a town on the Pacific coast of Iwate Prefecture that was engulfed by the tsunami in March 2011. Round set up cameras in the cabs of taxis and left them running. In the frame are four drivers, Toru Konno, Yoshiji

Coco Chanel as Abwehr agent F-7124 and her 1941 attempt to seize Parfums Chanel

Everyone remembers that Coco Chanel was a collaborator and worked for the Abwehr, that is, for German military intelligence? This is not conjecture or gossip but a well-documented part of her biography. So, she not only tried, with the help of her fascist patrons, to wrest a perfume company

Read more

Kiel archaeologists link tool reworking in southern Africa to food availability

Archaeologist James Starkey, Finder of the Lachish Letters, Was Killed in 1938 Over a Land Dispute

British director Catherine Round films taxi drivers of Kamaishi, a city hit by the 2011 tsunami

Coco Chanel as Abwehr agent F-7124 and her 1941 attempt to seize Parfums Chanel