The great 19th-century warehouses and factories along the Golden Horn, as in other industrial ports, are being gradually converted to new uses. For all this the neighbourhoods along the Golden Horn remain among the least altered parts of the city. The scale is small, with low houses painted in washes of turquoise, amber and peeling grey. It is a little untidy, with dillapidated houses, chickens, scruffy children, plenty of washing hanging overhead, and appearing here and there, remains of the city walls and the Byzantine ruins of the Blachernae. This is the gentlest part of the city, where you can discover forgotten sacred springs and old beer houses. It is a bit like the Rome depicted in the sketches of eighteenth-century French artists, a mine of incalculably important antiquity that continues to gather silt.