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honour of the Emperor Marcian. The Turks call the column Kız Taşı,
or the Maiden's Column, because of the figure of the Nike on the
base. Evliya Çelebi believed the Nike to be the figure of a Byzantine
princess, daughter of an apocryphal ruler named King Puzantine (a
corruption of Byzantine), and he claimed that the Maiden's Column
had talismanic powers: “At the head of the Saddler's Bazaar, on the
summit of a column stretching to the skies, there is a chest of white
marble in which the unlucky-starred daughter of King Puzantine lies
buried; and to preserve her remains from ants and insects was this
column made a talisman.”
MEDRESE OF FEYZULLAH EFENDI
We now return to the main avenue and continue walking westward
on the same side. We soon come to another little külliye built at
about the same time as the Amcazade complex; this one is almost
as charming though not as extensive. This is the medrese founded
in 1700 by the Şeyh-ül Islam Feyzullah Efendi; it now serves as the
Millet Kütüphanesi, or People's Library. The cells of the medrese
surround two sides of the courtyard in which stands a şadırvan in the
midst of a pretty garden. The street side of the courtyard is wholly
occupied by a most elaborate and original dershane building: a flight
of steps leads up to a sort of porch covered by nine domes of diferent
patterns, the arches of which are supported on four columns. The
efect of this porch has been somewhat impaired by glazing in a part
of it, but its usefulness has doubtless been increased. To right and left
of the porch are the large domed lecture-rooms, now used as library
reading-rooms. The medrese, long disafected and ruinous, was
restored and converted into a library by Ali Emiri Efendi, a famous
bibliophile who died in 1924 and left the building and his valuable
collection of books and manuscripts to the people of Istanbul. The
reading-rooms are almost always full of students.
COMPLEX OF FATİH SULTAN MEHMET
We now find ourselves opposite the enormous mosque complex of
Mehmet the Conqueror. Let us continue past it along the avenue for
a few hundred metres and then turn right on the first through-street,
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