The Mese began at the Milion, the gilded milestone monument near the Hagia Sophia, and drove straight westward through the heart of Constantinople. Within 600 meters it reached the oval Forum of Constantine, where one of the city's two Senate houses stood, and where the column of the city's founder still rises today. This first stretch was called the Regia — the Imperial Road — its name suggesting not just a thoroughfare but a statement of power. Beyond Constantine's forum the street widened again at the Forum of Theodosius, where the great esplanade known as the Makros Embolos joined it. At their junction stood the Anemodoulion, a four-faced monument the Byzantines called the Servant of the Winds.

Past the Forum of Theodosius the Mese divided. One branch bent northwest, passing the Church of the Holy Apostles, toward the Gate of Polyandrion. The other continued southwest, threading through the Forum of the Ox and the Forum of Arcadius before reaching the Golden Gate — the great marble triumphal arch through which the Via Egnatia entered the city and through which conquering emperors made their entrance. That southwestern branch carried the most ceremonial weight. The processions that moved along it were choreographed events: the emperor dismounting at intervals to receive relics from church officials, crowds laying palm branches, soldiers in formation, captives in chains walking ahead of the triumph. These processions continued at least through the Comnenian period in the 12th century.

When Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, he rebuilt his palace on roughly the same promontory the Byzantine emperors had used. The road that led to it from the city's western walls mattered again immediately. Istanbul's new rulers called it Divan Yolu — the Road to the Divan — because dignitaries processed along it to reach the administrative council inside Topkapı Palace. Ottoman monuments accumulated along its length: the Firuz Ağa Mosque, the Köprülü Library, and the tombs of sultans Mahmud II, Abdülaziz, and Abdülhamid II. Two civilizations, separated by a conquest, had found the same road indispensable.

The modern Divan Yolu is cafes and bookshops and tourist hotels, the tram line T1 running along the old Roman paving at street level. The Lale Restaurant near Sultanahmet occupies the site of the Pudding Shop, the legendary 1970s gathering point for travelers heading overland to Kathmandu — a place that appeared in the Alan Parker film Midnight Express. West of Beyazıt Square, which sits where the Forum of Theodosius once spread, the street becomes Yeniçeriler Caddesi (Janissary Street) and then Ordu Caddesi (Army Street). The names change every few blocks, reflecting layers of naming and renaming, but the route holds. From the Milion to the old Theodosian Walls, the Mese persists as one of the most continuously used roads in the world.