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The winding streets of old Istanbul are an overlapping cacophony of seagulls, ship horns and vendors of colorful fresh fruit. Shady fig trees cluster near crumbling Byzantine walls and sweeping Ottoman palaces, remnants of the empires that conquered and lost this strategic point on the Bosporus Strait, which formed the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Underneath it all is an ancient world that's almost invisible, unless you know where to look.

"Can you imagine my excitement when I saw this for the first time?" exclaims archaeologist Ferudun Ozgumus, as he leads the way down a rickety wooden staircase into a cavernous structure deep beneath a carpet shop. "It was full of debris as far as that corner of the arch," he says, pointing across the space to a point 15 feet overhead. "We were crawling!"

For more than 20 years, Ozgumus has knocked on the doors of Istanbul's oldest neighborhoods and asked to see the basement. At 64, the Istanbul University professor is one of the first archaeologists in Turkey devoted to studying the city's underground spaces. He has identified more than 300 sites, and he knows there are hundreds more.

As soon as you step inside the corridor of the carpet shop basement, the temperature drops. Arches, at least 20 feet high, are evenly spaced through the structure. Water drips from the ceiling, and as you look up, you see swirls of bricks — thin and rust-colored, alternating with thick stripes of mortar.

"The thickness of the bricks, the thickness of the mortar between the bricks and the color all tell me the date of the structure," Ozgumus explains. "You can see this arch, it's hewn stones, cut stones. This arch is older. I'm sure that this is from the 2nd century A.D."