Calchedon — modern Kadıköy, now absorbed into Istanbul's Asian shore — was a Megarian colony founded around 685 BC, famously derided by the Delphic oracle as a city of the blind for its founders' failure to recognize the superior site directly across the Bosphorus that would later become Byzantium. By Caracalla's reign the city retained enough civic pride to strike its own bronze, though provincial issues from Bithynian Calchedon are thinly documented and this type remains poorly represented in major collections.
Calchedon — modern Kadıköy, now absorbed into Istanbul's Asian shore — was a Megarian colony founded around 685 BC, famously derided by the Delphic oracle as a city of the blind for its founders' failure to recognize the superior site directly across the Bosphorus that would later become Byzantium. By Caracalla's reign the city retained enough civic pride to strike its own bronze, though provincial issues from Bithynian Calchedon are thinly documented and this type remains poorly represented in major collections.