Hippodrome of Constantinople 1953–1976. Hippodrome of Constantinople The Hippodrome of Constantinople () was a circus that was the sporting and social centre of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. Today it is a square named "Sultanahmet Meydanı" ("Sultan Ahmet Square") in the Turkish city of Istanbul, with a few fragments of the original structure surviving. The word "hippodrome" comes from the Greek "hippos" (), horse, and "dromos" (δρόμος), path or way. For this reason, it is sometimes also called "Atmeydanı" ("Horse Square") in Turkish. Horse racing and chariot racing were popular pastimes in the ancient world and hippodromes were common features of Greek
Romanization of Greek as "avlos" or "aulos", depending on the system chosen, the first two letters of the word άυλο are separate syllables, and an appropriate romanization is "aÿlo", where the diaeresis over the letter "y" serves to indicate it is a separate vowel here.) The traditional polytonic orthography of Greek uses several distinct diacritical marks to render what was originally the pitch accent of Ancient Greek and the presence or absence of word-initial . In 1982, monotonic orthography was officially introduced for modern Greek. The only diacritics that remain are the acute accent (indicating stress) and the diaeresis (indicating that two consecutive