Panorama 1453 History Museum

This guide to the Panorama 1453 History Museum in Istanbul puts you inside a 360-degree, ten-thousand-figure painting of the morning of May 29, 1453, when a twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan closed in on a Constantinople defended by a thousand years of Roman and Byzantine walls and a great iron chain sealing the harbor. It follows the young sultan's engineers as they try to solve the problem the chain poses, hauling ships along a route built for the purpose. Stand at the center of the rotunda, where the cannons at your feet blur into the painted smoke above.