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This is an old build that I recently discovered in the depths of my file system. I did it on my iPad a few years back and didn’t even know that world edit exists. So it REALLY took a lot of pointless placing of blocks. I don’t regret it tho, however because of the manual nature of the endeavour the build quality is quite subpar to today. Also this build is super inaccurate, check out my more recent Hagia Sophia build, it is both more historical and looks better.

I started by building Hagia Sophia in 1:1 scale and it turned out really nice I thought. The exterior design of brick and stone looked very Byzantine to me regardless of its historicity. Then I decided since I already built Hagia Sophia I might build Hagia Irene too. Then the Augustaion, the hospital of Sampson, the basilica cistern. Then I thought to myself, if I built all these wonderful things, I might as well build the hippodrome. With it complete, I was quite invested and decided to build the great palace.

The great palace however proved to look really shitty at 1:1 scale. Given there aren’t many archaeological evidence of where things used to be, I just scaled everything up but tried to be reasonably historical. The byzantium 1200 website helped a great deal in that.

So in the end revisiting it now the build looks cool from a distance but doesn’t boast of particularly fantastic interiors, though they are there (hence my omitting of them in the photos).

Thanks for reading this if you did and I hope you enjoy the build!