The Kontoscalion is generally held to have stood in front of Koum Kapoussi, where the traces of an old harbour, about 270 yards wide and some 217 yards long, are still discernible in an extensive mole off the shore, and in the great bend described by the city walls at that point to enclose an area which, at one time, was evidently a basin of water. There is scarcely any room for doubt that this view is correct. The adherence of the name Kontoscalion to this quarter, apparently, ever since the Turkish Conquest,[1104] is in favour of the opinion. So, likewise, is the fact that thus it becomes intelligible how Pachymeres[1105] and Bondelmontius[1106] associate the harbour with Vlanga, on the one hand, while Nicephorus Gregoras[1107] associates it with the Hippodrome on the other. It is also a corroboration of this view to find on the walls of the harbour the coat-of-arms of Andronicus II., who is declared, by one authority, to have restored the Kontoscalion.[1108] The only objection to this identification is found in the difference between the character of the actual enclosure around the harbour at Koum Kapoussi and the character of the enclosure which Michael Palæologus placed around the Kontoscalion. The former consists of the ordinary walls of the city; the latter consisted, according to Pachymeres,[1109] of very large blocks of stone: ὥστε γυρῶσαι μὲν μεγίσταις πέτραις τὸν κύκλῳ τόπον. But in reply to this objection it may be said, either (though not without some violence to the words of the historian) that the great blocks of stone referred to were the boulders which form the mole of the harbour; or that the work done under Michael Palæologus was temporary, and was superseded by the improvements executed in the reign of his son and successor Andronicus II. The objection must not be ignored.[1110] Harbour of Eleutherius and Theodosius. According to the _Notitia_,[1111] Constantinople possessed a harbour called Portus Theodosianus, in the Twelfth Region of the city. As that Region comprised within its limits the shore of the Sea of Marmora at the southern base of the Seventh Hill, the Harbour of Theodosius must have been found at Vlanga Bostan, where the basin of a very ancient harbour, now filled in and converted into market-gardens, is distinctly visible. There can be little doubt that this harbour was also the one which went by the name Harbour of Eleutherius[1112] (ὁ λιμὴν τοῦ Ἐλευθερίου): for the district of Eleutherius, and the palace of that name,[1113] were situated in the valley leading from Vlanga Bostan to Ak Serai, and the Et Meidan. The harbour at Vlanga Bostan, moreover, corresponds to the description given of the Harbour of Eleutherius by the Anonymus,[1114] who speaks of it as a very ancient harbour, situated to the west of that of Sophia, and abandoned long before his time.