Istanbul: History

History
Istanbul’s history runs deep enough that it’s genuinely hard to compress — founded as Byzantium by Greek colonists around 657 BC, the city’s real transformation began in 330 AD when Roman Emperor Constantine the Great made it his new capital, renaming it Constantinople and positioning it as the centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, which would later become the Byzantine Empire.

For over a thousand years, Constantinople stood as one of the wealthiest, most fortified cities in the world — its land walls successfully repelled siege after siege, an engineering achievement that protected the city through the medieval period even as the rest of the Roman world fragmented around it. The Hagia Sophia, completed in 537 AD under Emperor Justinian, was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years and remains one of the most significant pieces of Byzantine architecture anywhere.

That run of Byzantine rule ended in 1453, when Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II finally breached the legendary walls after a 53-day siege — a moment that effectively marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and the beginning of nearly 500 years of Ottoman rule. The city, renamed Istanbul, became the capital of an empire that would stretch across three continents at its height, and the Ottoman sultans built extensively, adding the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, and dozens of other monuments across the old city.

Istanbul stopped being Turkey’s capital in 1923, when the newly founded Republic of Turkey moved its seat of government to Ankara under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — but Istanbul never stopped being the country’s cultural and economic heart, and remains by far its largest and most internationally significant city today.