🇹🇷 Turkey · Istanbul and Marmara
Few cities carry as much historical weight as Istanbul. Here, on the seven hills overlooking the Bosphorus, Constantinople rose, capital of the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years and the dream target of conquerors; and here, after the city fell in 1453, the Ottoman sultans built their imperial capital, filling it with mosques, palaces and bazaars. The result is a palimpsest of a city where a 6th-century basilica turned mosque faces a 17th-century Ottoman mosque, where Roman cisterns lie under the ground and where the call to prayer mixes with the clatter of the tram.
But Istanbul is not a museum: it is a living, frantic metropolis of more than fifteen million people, split between Europe and Asia by the Bosphorus strait, with ferries crossing nonstop, markets that smell of spices, cafés where people play backgammon and a food and nightlife scene that never stops. It is chaotic, noisy and sometimes exhausting, but also hospitable, sensual and addictive. You go from the hush of a mosque to haggling in the Grand Bazaar and from there to a tea by the water watching the ships go by.
This guide helps you move through that immensity with practical sense: what you must see in the historic Sultanahmet quarter, how to use the Istanbulkart, how much tickets cost today (they rise with inflation), how to do the classic Bosphorus trip, where to eat well and how to avoid the tourist traps. Istanbul deserves a few unhurried days: it is one of those cities you love more the more you walk them.
Istanbul was founded by Greek colonists around the 7th century BC under the name Byzantium. In the year 330 AD the emperor Constantine refounded it as Constantinople, new capital of the Roman Empire and then the heart of the Byzantine Empire for more than a thousand years, the richest and most populous city in Christendom. In 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II conquered it after a famous siege, and the city became the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which filled it with mosques, palaces and bazaars. After the fall of the empire and the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the capital moved to Ankara, but Istanbul remained the country's great economic and cultural centre. From Byzantium to Constantinople and from Constantinople to Istanbul: three names for one of the most important cities in history, whose long story we tell in detail on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The hinge at the heart of two continents: Istanbul, capital of two empires on the Bosphorus, and the plain of Troy and the Dardanelles, where legend and great wars left their mark.
Read the history of Istanbul and Marmara →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Legend says that around the 7th century BC, a group of Greek colonists from the city of Megara asked the oracle at Delphi where to found a new city. The oracle answered with a riddle: they were to settle 'opposite the land of the blind'. When they reached the Bosphorus and saw the magnificent peninsula where the Golden Horn meets the strait, they understood that the earlier colonists, who had settled opposite in Chalcedon (today's Kadıköy), must have been blind not to see that prodigious spot. Their leader was called Byzas, and in his honour the new city was named Byzantium.
Beyond the myth, the site was indeed extraordinary. The peninsula was protected by the sea on three sides, commanded the only sea route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and had an exceptional natural harbour, the Golden Horn, a deep sheltered inlet of water. Whoever controlled Byzantium controlled the passage between Europe and Asia and one of the most important trade routes of the ancient world.
For centuries, Byzantium was a prosperous Greek city-state that passed through the hands of Persians, Athenians and Spartans, and in the 2nd century AD it was absorbed into the Roman Empire. Its strategic position made it coveted, but also vulnerable: the emperor Septimius Severus razed it after a long siege at the end of the 2nd century and then rebuilt it. Nobody yet imagined that this city was destined to become the capital of the world.
The city's fate changed forever in the year 330, when the emperor Constantine the Great decided to move the capital of the Roman Empire from old Rome to Byzantium, which he solemnly refounded under the name Constantinople, 'the city of Constantine', though it was also called New Rome. The choice was brilliant: the city was better placed to defend the eastern frontiers and control trade, and from it a new civilisation would be born.
When the Roman Empire was definitively divided and the western half collapsed in the 5th century under the Germanic invasions, Constantinople remained standing as capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which historians call the Byzantine Empire. For more than a thousand years it was the richest, most populous and most sophisticated city in Europe: it reached half a million inhabitants when Paris and London were villages. Its formidable land walls, those of Theodosius, made it practically impregnable for centuries.
The golden age came in the 6th century with the emperor Justinian, who reconquered part of the Mediterranean, codified Roman law and ordered the building of Hagia Sophia, the largest church in Christendom, whose colossal dome left visitors speechless. Constantinople was the heart of Orthodox Christianity, guardian of sacred relics, seat of the emperor and of the patriarch. It survived countless sieges by Persians, Avars, Arabs and Bulgars. Its worst wound, however, did not come from its Muslim enemies but from fellow Christians: in 1204, the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from their course, savagely sacked the city, divided up the empire and carried off its treasures. Constantinople recovered in 1261, but it was never the same again: weakened and impoverished, it was a shrinking empire surrounded by enemies.
By the start of the 15th century, the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople and its surroundings, a Christian islet completely encircled by the thriving Ottoman Empire, which already controlled the Balkans and Anatolia. It was a matter of time. The final blow was struck by a young and ambitious sultan, Mehmed II, who at 21 laid siege to the city in the spring of 1453, determined to conquer it.
The siege was one of the most famous in history. Mehmed assembled an enormous army and revolutionary artillery, with gigantic cannon capable of bringing down the legendary walls of Theodosius, which for a thousand years had held out against everyone. To get past the chain closing the Golden Horn, the Ottomans did something astonishing: they hauled their ships overland, on greased logs, up the hill and down again, to launch them inside the harbour. The last emperor, Constantine XI, defended the city with barely a few thousand men against tens of thousands of besiegers.
In the early hours of 29 May 1453, after weeks of bombardment and assaults, the Ottomans broke through the defences and entered the city. Constantine XI died fighting, sword in hand, and his body was never identified, which fed centuries of legend. The fall of Constantinople ended the Byzantine Empire and more than a thousand years of Roman history; for many historians, it marked the end of the Middle Ages. Mehmed II, who rode into Hagia Sophia on horseback and ordered it turned into a mosque, went down in history as Fatih, 'the Conqueror'. The city had a new owner and a new era was beginning.
Mehmed II did not destroy the conquered city: he repopulated it and made it the capital of his empire. He brought in Muslim, Christian and Jewish settlers, restored the walls, began building Topkapı Palace as the seat of power and founded the Grand Bazaar, which would become the great market of the East. The city, increasingly known by its popular Turkish name, Istanbul (a corruption of a Greek expression meaning 'to the city'), was reborn as a cosmopolitan, multi-religious metropolis.
Splendour came in the 16th century, under sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, when the Ottoman Empire reached its greatest extent and power, ruling from Hungary to Egypt and from Algeria to the Persian Gulf. Istanbul was then one of the largest and richest cities in the world. The brilliant architect Mimar Sinan, in the service of the sultans, covered the city's seven hills with monumental mosques of domes and slender minarets, such as the Süleymaniye, giving it the unmistakable profile it still has today. The city was the seat of the sultan, who also held the title of caliph, spiritual leader of Sunni Islam.
For centuries, Istanbul was the beating heart of an immense and diverse empire, where Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs and Balkan peoples lived side by side, each community with its own quarters, its temples and its trades. The Fener and Balat neighbourhoods housed Orthodox Greeks and Jews; Galata, north of the Golden Horn, had been a Genoese colony and remained the district of Europeans and of trade. But from the 18th century on, the Ottoman Empire lost ground to the European powers and entered a long decline; in the 19th century it was called 'the sick man of Europe'. The sultans abandoned old Topkapı for European-style palaces on the shores of the Bosphorus, such as the lavish Dolmabahçe.
The beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire came with the First World War, in which Turkey fought alongside Germany and was defeated. After the war, the victorious powers occupied Istanbul and planned to divide up the country. Out of that crisis came a decisive figure: Mustafa Kemal, the officer who had shone in the defence of Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles, near ancient Troy. Kemal led the Turkish War of Independence, drove out the occupying troops and in 1923 proclaimed the Republic of Turkey, of which he was the first president, under the name Atatürk, 'father of the Turks'.
Atatürk undertook a radical, secular modernisation of the country: he abolished the sultanate and the caliphate, adopted the Latin alphabet, reformed the law and separated religion from the state. And he took a symbolic decision of enormous weight: he moved the capital from Istanbul to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia, to mark the birth of a new nation cut loose from the imperial past. Istanbul stopped being a capital for the first time in sixteen centuries, though it remained the country's great economic and cultural engine. In 1930, the city's official international name became definitively Istanbul.
The 20th century transformed the city completely. The Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, which for centuries had been an essential part of Istanbul, shrank drastically through wars, population exchanges and episodes of violence. At the same time, a wave of migration from rural Anatolia made the population explode: from fewer than a million inhabitants in the middle of the century, Istanbul grew to more than fifteen million today, becoming one of the largest megacities in Europe and the world. Bridges were built over the Bosphorus, along with motorways, an expanding metro and even an undersea rail tunnel, the Marmaray, which links the two continents beneath the strait.
Today Istanbul is a vibrant, contradictory city, where the weight of three empires lives alongside the energy of a global metropolis: Ottoman mosques next to skyscrapers, hipster cafés in Byzantine neighbourhoods, thousand-year-old markets and an art and food scene in full swing. It is still the great crossroads between East and West, between Europe and Asia, between past and future. As its most famous son, the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, wrote, Istanbul carries a particular melancholy in its soul, that of hüzün, the nostalgia for a lost glory that soaks its streets. And yet, few cities in the world are so intensely alive.