Scuba Diving Beneath Hagia Sophia

BLDGBLOG reports on an upcoming film that nearly makes me wet my pants with excitement:

While scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia, an exploratory team led by filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy has "managed to reach areas that until now, no one had ever managed to reach," down there in flooded basins 1000 feet beneath Istanbul's heavily touristed religious structure.
In the process, they have discovered 800-year old submerged graves containing the remains of "canonized children."
This was just part of a larger, underwater archaeo-spatial survey:

The divers and specialists explored the connection of the basins underneath Aghia Sophia with the aqueduct and the palace of Top Kapi. In addition they attempted to locate the secret tunnels from Tekfour Palace to the Islands.

Those "secret tunnels" are presumably the rumored subterranean extensions of the Anemas Dungeons – but who knows.

Secret tunnels from Tekfur Sarayı to the Islands? Subterranean dungeons? Sign me up!

Urban Ruins: The Fort Mason Tunnel

This old railroad tunnel is nestled under Fort Mason in San Francisco. Built in late 1914, it was the western extension of the old State Belt Railroad, connecting the Port of SF to the Presidio. The Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 was about to go down, and they needed a way to get the thousands of tons of building materials from the port over to the marina. It also made it much easier to ship military people and materiel into the Presidio.

There's not much left of the Belt Line now. You can still see some tracks in the pavement near the east side of the Fort Mason hill. The tunnel is most of what's left, and makes a fun short jaunt into San Francisco history. Some photos from a recent expedition with a friend of mine.



The west exit, near the Marina Safeway: