Great Palace Mosaic Museum

The Great Palace Mosaic Museum (Turkish: Büyük Saray Mozaikleri Müzesi), is located close to Sultanahmet Square in Istanbul, Turkey, at Arasta Bazaar.

The museum houses mosaics from the Byzantine period, unearthed at the site of the Great Palace of Constantinople.

[1] It was uncovered by British archaeologists from the University of St Andrews in Scotland during extensive excavations at the Arasta Bazaar in Sultan Ahmet Square in 1935–1938 and 1951–1954.

It was at this point that the Austrian Academy of Sciences, supervised by Prof. Dr. Werner Jobst, undertook to study and preserve the famous palace mosaic and to carry out additional archeological examinations (1983–1997) within the scope of a cooperative project with the Directorate General of Monuments and Museums in Turkey.

The subject matter of the mosaics range from a Dionysian procession (the elephant and woman with a jug to many combat scenes featuring both human and non-human animal fighters.