Istanbul History Quotes

Just after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (who later won the Nobel Prize) observed, in Istanbul, the ordinary and peaceable inhabitants of the city displaying great joy at the collapse of the Twin Towers. What was the explanation? ‘It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself that directly engenders support for terrorists whose ferocity and ingenuity are unprecedented in human history; it is, rather, the crushing humiliation that has infected the third-world countries.

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.

It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be. This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history. It is history as fashion. Trend. Moments. Moments lost and... overwritten. You have to hunt the past in NY. Not like Prague. Budapest. Krakow. Paris. Istanbul. These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts. A woman. Not a girl. New York... is youth. Always trying on new masks, new faces.

On the Ostankino channels the President's personal confessor, the Archimandrite Tikhon, dressed in a long black cassock and walking through Istanbul, is telling a prime-time tale about the fall of Byzantium, of how the great Orthodox Empire (to which Russia is the successor) was brought low by a mix of oligarchs and the West. Professional historians howl in protest at this pseudo-history, but the Kremlin is starting to use religion and the supernatural for its own ends. Byzantium and Muscovy could only flourish under one great autocrat, the Archimandrite states. This is why we need the President to be like a tsar.

Until I was ten, I had a very clear image of God; ravaged with age and draped in white scarves, God had the featureless guise of a highly respectable woman. Although She resembled a human being, She had more in common with the phantoms that populated my dreams: not at all like someone I might run into on the street. Because when She appeared before my eyes, She was upside down and turned slightly to one side. The phantoms of my imaginary world faded bashfully into the background as soon as I noticed them, but then so did She; after the sort of elegant rolling shot of the surrounding world that you see in some films and television commercials, Her image would sharpen and She would begin to ascend, fading as She rose to Her rightful place in the clouds. The folds of Her white head scarf were as sharp and elaborate as the ones I’d seen on statues and in the illustrations in history books, and they covered Her body entirely; I couldn’t even see Her arms or legs. Whenever this specter appeared before me, I felt a powerful, sublime, and exalted presence but surprisingly little fear. I don’t remember ever asking for Her help or guidance. I was only too aware that She was not interested in people like me: She cared only for the poor.

Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe.

The stories abounded, both recounting these cross-continental journeys and perhaps inspiring them – how Hellenic Jason gathered his Argonauts together (including Augeas, whose vast stables Herakles would be forced to clean) for adventure and profit, how he stopped off along the Bosphorus and discovered the land of the rising sun before other Greek heroes headed to Asia in search of Helen, Troy and glory. In the Homeric epics we hear of Jason travelling east where he tangles with Medea of Colchis, her aunt Circe and the feisty Amazon tribe. Lured by the promise of gold (early and prodigious metalworking did indeed take place in the region – perhaps sparking the Greek idea that the East was ‘rich in gold’) and then detained by the potions and poisons of Princess Medea, Jason succeeded in penetrating the Caucasus – a land which, in the Greek mind, wept with both peril and promise. It was here that Prometheus was chained to a rock with iron rivets for daring to steal fire from the gods. Archaeology east of Istanbul demonstrates how myth grazes history.

In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish.

Hekate in Byzantium (also Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey) It is probable that Hekate had an established presence in Byzantium from a time before the city was founded. Here Hekate was invoked by her title of Phosphoros by the local population for her help when Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) attacked the city in 340 BCE. Petridou summarises the account given by Hsych of Miletus: "Hecate, or so we are told, assisted them by sending clouds of fire in a moonless rainy night; thus, she made it possible for them to see clearly and fight back against their enemies. By some sort of divine instigation the dogs began barking[164], thus awakening the Byzantians and putting them on a war footing."[165] There is a slightly alternative account of the attack, recorded by Eustathios. He wrote that Philip of Macedon's men had dug secret tunnels from where they were preparing a stealth attack. However, their plans were ruined when the goddess, as Phosphoros, created mysterious torchlight which illuminated the enemies. Philip and his men fled, and the locals subsequently called the place where this happened Phosphorion. Both versions attribute the successful defence of the city to the goddess as Phosphoros. In thanksgiving, a statue of Hekate, holding two torches, was erected in Byzantium soon after. The support given by the goddess in battle brings to mind a line from Hesiod’s Theogony: “And when men arm themselves for the battle that destroys men, then the goddess is at hand to give victory and grant glory readily to whom she will.” [166] A torch race was held on the Bosphorus each year, in honour of a goddess which, in light of the above story, is likely to have been Phosphoros. Unfortunately, we have no evidence to clarify who the goddess the race was dedicated to was. Other than Phosphoros, it is possible that the race was instead held in honour of the Thracian Bendis, Ephesian Artemis or Hekate. All of which were also of course conflated with one another at times. Artemis and Hekate both share the title of Phosphoros. Bendis is never explicitly named in texts, but a torch race in her honour was held in Athens after her cult was introduced there in the fifth-century BCE. Likewise, torch-races took place in honour of Artemis. There is also a theory that the name Phosphoros may have become linguistically jumbled due to a linguistic influence from Thrace becoming Bosphorus in the process[167]. The Bosphorus is the narrow, natural strait connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, separating the European side of Istanbul from the Asian side. The goddess with two torches shown on coins of the time is unnamed. She is usually identified as Artemis but could equally represent Hekate.

We often associate science with the values of secularism and tolerance. If so, early modern Europe is the last place you would have expected a scientific revolution. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you had travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe. If you had then sailed on to contemporary Paris or London, you would have found cities awash with religious extremism, in which only those belonging to the dominant sect could live. In London they killed Catholics, in Paris they killed Protestants, the Jews had long been driven out, and nobody in his right mind would dream of letting any Muslims in. And yet, the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris rather than in Cairo and Istanbul.

Coming as a kind of pleasure-package with her parents and sisters, as a girl Theodora performed acrobatic tricks and erotic dances in and around the hippodrome – part of the fringe of shows, spectacles and penny theatricals that accompanied the games. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that one of Theodora’s most popular turns was a re-enactment of the story of Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the Swan (Zeus in disguise). The Greek myth went that Zeus was so enraptured with Queen Leda when he espied her bathing by the banks of the River Eurotas that he turned himself into a swan so that he could ravish the Spartan Queen. Theodora, as Leda, would leave a trail of grain up on to (some said into) her body, which the ‘swan’ (in Constantinople in fact a goose) then eagerly consumed. The Empress’s detractors delighted in memorialising the fact that Theodora’s services were eagerly sought out for anal intercourse, as both an active and a passive partner. As a child and as an adolescent woman Theodora would have been considered dirt, but she was, physically, right at the heart of human affairs in a burgeoning city in interesting times. Theodora was also, obviously, wildly attractive. Born in either Cyprus or Syria, as a teenager – already the mother of a young girl and with a history of abortions – she left Constantinople as the companion of a Syrian official, the governor of Libya Pentapolis. The two travelled to North Africa, where, after four years of maltreatment, she found herself abandoned by the Byzantine official, her meal-ticket revoked. A discarded mistress, on the road, was as wretched as things could get in the sixth century. (...) Theodora tried to find her way back to the mother city, making ends meet as a prostitute, and the only people to give the twenty-year-old reject shelter were a group of Christians in the city of Alexandria. That random act of kindness was epoch-forming.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victim hood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changes on both sides." Baron Baghdassarian

By the end of my first year at the university (1938-39), the history of art professor organized a trip for his students to be sightseeing in Turkey, Greece and Egypt. We were supposed to study especially the Hadjia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul, the pyramids in Egypt and the many architectural sights in Greece. The trip was supposed to take place in September, 1939. I had registered for the student trip abroad, in the company of friendly colleagues. As a preparation for the boat crossings, I had a tailor make for me a rain jacket, with a woolen buttoned-in lining. We were supposed to travel by boat from Constan ta, a Black Sea port in Romania. That trip never materialized since World War II broke out on September 1, 1939. The only good that came of these preparations was the jacket, which did me great duty during the war years.

The first code, discovered among texts in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, dates from about 2050 BC, the work of Ur Nammu, ‘king of Sumer and Akkad’, the Third Dynasty of Ur.

Aided by many high-ranking officials, the military entered Istanbul and massacred many of the sultan’s closest allies in court,

late May, they stormed the palace in Istanbul and forced the sultan to abdicate.

He declared Selim as the new Ottoman sultan and left Istanbul to spend the rest of his days in peace.

One of the most interesting Paleolithic sites is the Yarımburgaz Cave in Istanbul.

Al-Wahhab allied with Muhammed bin Saud, the founder of the state of Saudi Arabia, and provided religious and ideological backing to the newly formed state.  The Wahhabi Saudi troops took advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I to seize control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It’s probably safe to say that the Shia will never forgive the Wahhabis for the zealotry they pursued upon taking the cities, which included obliterating centuries-old sacred Shia shrines and claiming that they were used to worship the Imams as gods and were therefore heretical.  In the Cemetery of al-Baqi in Medina, they utterly destroyed the tombs of the Imams Hasan, Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammed ibn Ali, and Jafar, as well as the tomb of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad.  In Mecca, they destroyed the Cemetery of Mualla, where the ancestors of Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were buried.  These prominent destructions were part of a pattern of violence that witnessed the Wahhabi Saudis smash buildings, tombs and mosques associated with the history of the Prophet and his family and which were venerated by Shia.  In addition, they alienated Shia from governance and oppressed them throughout the kingdom[26].  This vandalism has been repeated time and time again by Wahhabis in other areas as well, including the much-publicized destruction of the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001[27] and the outbreak of violence in 2013 around the city of Timbuktu, where Wahhabi fundamentalists  destroyed holy artifacts and burned a priceless library of manuscripts before fleeing the arrival of French troops[28]. While the establishment of the Wahhabi school of thought created an intellectual form of anti-Shia ideology, it is probable that this philosophy would have remained isolated in the political backwater of the Nejd Sultanate (the core of modern Saudi Arabia) if not for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the final abolition of the Caliphate. The Ottomans had claimed to be Caliphs of the Muslim world since 1453, the same year that they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Byzantine Empire, and they ruled over a considerable portion of the world's Sunnis, as well as the shrine cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.  After 1876, the Sultans had placed particular emphasis on their role as Caliphs in order to bolster their global position by asserting their Empire's "Muslim” character, and while this was never universally accepted by all Sunnis or Shias, Sunni Muslims everywhere at least could say that there was a government that claimed to represent the form of rule established by the Prophet and that provided legitimacy and continuity.

Mehmed II wasted no time making Constantinople, now re-named Istanbul (City of Islam),

(modern Istanbul) and the realm of Asia Minor, a powerful civilization carried the torch of classical civilization

When she died in 1558, the streets of Istanbul were thronged with thousands of mourners.

To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul.

Istanbul has never been the colony of the Westerners who wrote about it, drew it, filmed it, and that is why I am not so perturbed by the use Western travellers have made of my past and my history in their construction of the exotic. Indeed, I find their fears and dreams beguiling – as exotic to me as ours are to them – and I don’t just look to them for entertainment or to see the city through their eyes, but also to enter into the full-formed world they’ve conjured up. Especially when reading the Western travellers of the nineteenth century – perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand – I realise the ‘my’ city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline from the angles most familiar to me – from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines – so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me: it’s at times like these that I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel that I’ve become one with that Western traveller, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorising, judging and in so doing often usurping their dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the Western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery, contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place, and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for the last hundred and fifty

Here among the old stones and the old wooden houses, history made peace with it's ruins; ruins nourished life, and gave new life to history.

The fact that NSO sold Pegasus in 2017 to the Saudis barely registered any outrage until the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in December 2018. Israel has a long covert history of relations with Saudi Arabia, providing intelligence about threats to its royal family from as early as the 1970s.49 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who became the country’s spy chief, spent decades meeting Israeli and Jewish leaders as well as Mossad chiefs.50 NSO was immediately blamed for being an accessory to the Khashoggi killing, giving the accused ring leader bin Salman and his team the ability to track Khashoggi’s movements before his death. NSO denied any responsibility but nonetheless reportedly briefly canceled its contract with the Kingdom. NSO’s denials of any complicity in the murder were bogus, with evidence emerging that his wife, fiancé, and associates had their phones compromised by Pegasus both before his death and in the days after, including by the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia that often tracks dissidents for its friend. Today, both Khashoggi’s wife and fiancé, Hanan Elatr and Hatice Cengiz, live in fear for their lives.51

The top of its dome still rises fifty-five metres above the pavements of modern Istanbul.

Fortunately, the Ottomans were unrivaled masters of supply-chain logistics. No other state in Europe devoted as much energy or care to the repair of its roads. From very early on, the Ottomans became justly famous as builders of beautiful stone bridges, whose delicate arches appeared to be as delicate as eggshells but proved as durable as iron. Supplies of food, cloth, gunpowder, and steel flowed continuously over this system of roadways. Camels, able to carry twice as much as any European beast of burden, made their transport easier. Every year, thirty thousand of these essential animals arrived from the Maghreb and Syria, in time for the campaigning season. But the real heart of the Ottoman procurement system was its bakeries. In Istanbul alone, 105 gigantic ovens worked around the clock, baking hardtack for the army and navy stores. Many more operated across the provinces.

The smallpox vaccination was developed in the Ottoman Empire. The vaccine subsequently made its way to England through the wife of an English ambassador who observed the practice in Istanbul.

Marco Polo’s father, Niccolò Polo, traded with the Persians who were known to the early Europeans. These early Persians came from the province of Fârs, sometimes known in Old Persian as Pârsâ, located in the southwestern region of Iran. As a people, they were united under the Achaemenid Dynasty in the 6th century BC, by Cyrus the Great. In 1260, Niccolò Polo and his brother Maffeo lived in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. After the Mongol conquest of Asia Minor, the Polo brothers liquidated their assets into tangible valuables such as gold and jewels and moved out of harm’s way. Having heard of advanced eastern civilizations the brothers traveled through much of Asia, and even met with the Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who later became emperor of China and established the Yuan Dynasty. Not being the first to travel east of Iran, they had heard numerous stories regarding the riches to be discovered in the Far East. Twenty-four years later in 1295, after traveling almost 15,000 miles, they returned to Venice with many riches and treasures. The Polo brothers had experienced a quarter century of adventures on their way to Asia that were later transcribed into The Book of Marco Polo by a writer named Rustichello, who came from Pisa in Tuscany, Italy. This was the beginning of a quest that motivated explorers, including Christopher Columbus, from that time on.

Istanbul is one of my favorite cities, this city has something which makes you fall in love with it. Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque never get tired to visit there, each time left that places with a new experience and understanding Hagia Sophia turned back into a Mosque, it's disgusting, sad and pity. you may get success to paint the history with the color of your choice but it is not permanent. history has such a brightness to reflect itself through all the curtains and paints. But if you are so dumb and political slaves to do not question your own leaders, then what moral right you have to ask the question to another country's political leaders? But if you are so lowlife citizen and impotent to do not question your own supreme court and system than what gives you right to ask the question to another country's court and system? In the way of Humanity and Peace, there is two biggest hurdle 1st Bigotry and 2nd Hypocrisy

The history of this place with three names–Byzantion or Byzantium (c. 670 BC to AD 330), Constantinople, al-Qustantiniyye then Kostantiniyye (c. AD 330 to 1930), Istanbul or Stimboli (c. AD 1453 onwards)–is often isolated into discrete blocks: ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish.

In 1867 a French Jew, Charles Netter, suggested to the Alliance a means to help Jews from Persia and Eastern Europe build new lives as farmers in Ottoman Palestine. With the organisation’s support, he went to Istanbul a year later and met the Grand Vizier of the Imperial State Council. Netter persuaded the Grand Vizier to procure a decree from the Sultan allowing the Alliance to lease land near Jaffa for a Jewish agricultural school. The Governor of Syria, Rashid Pasha, then authorised the purchase of a ninety–nine–year lease on 2,600 dunams (650 acres) of land.14 Netter built a school on this land in 1870, which he named Mikve Israel (‘The Hope of Israel’), serving as both principal and instructor there, and witnessing the beginnings of Jewish agricultural settlement in Ottoman Palestine.15

Jews volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Army as proof of their patriotism. The Istanbul–based Zionist newspaper Hamevasser repeatedly praised the participation of eighty Ottoman Jewish soldiers in the suppression of the Druze rebellion in southern Syria in 1910–11. This was a campaign in which more than fifty Jewish soldiers were wounded.4 Another effect of conscription was to prompt a new wave of Jewish migration. Thousands of young Jewish men left the Ottoman Empire to avoid being taken into the army. Many chose to cross the Atlantic and settle in the United States. In 1909 a Jewish community was founded in Portland, Oregon, made up of Jews from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara.5

By 1500 there were 1,700 printing presses distributed in 300 European cities in every country except Russia.16 In the Ottoman empire, a decree of Sultan Selim I specified the death penalty for anyone who even used a printing press. Istanbul did not acquire a printing press until 1726 and the owners were allowed to publish only a few titles before being closed down.

Coffee was first introduced by Yemeni Muslims. When Ottoman Empire grew, coffee spread to Istanbul and from there to the rest of Europe.

Although he took Constantinople by force, Mehmet did not impose Islam on the city's inhabitants. They were free to continue to practice religion as they did before the conquest.

Is this the secret of Istanbul—that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, its poor hide the city’s soul inside a fragile web?

also wish to express my thanks to the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Turkey and to the Director of the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul for generously making it possible for me to utilize the Sumerian literary tablets in the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient. To the two curators of the tablet collection of this museum, Muazzez cik and Hatice Kizilyay, I am particularly

they were Muslims who had a long history not unlike Christian history—namely, marching into countries where a bunch of folks thought differently than you about life and God and you ground your righteous heel into their throats. I was an infidel. But not inside here. In this house—and on the most threadbare couch in the most desolate, rubble-strewn vacant lot—coffee and tobacco were the common sacraments of the whole human race.

On 1 April AD 527 the Illyrian soldier was officially named Justin’s successor. When Justinian was acclaimed emperor he made his way in through Constantinople’s Golden Gate, down the processional route of the Mese, bordered originally with those wide vegetable gardens – the stuff of life of the city – and then with canopied walkways and sculptures (canopies and shops are still here, selling everything from apple tea to diamond-studded handguns). The shouts of acclamation for Constantinople’s new ruler would have bounced off the marble colonnades and the bronze statuary lining the processional way. And one in the city in particular must have listened to this brouhaha with great pleasure. Three years before, a rather extraordinary woman had moved into Justinian’s palace apartments to share his bed, and just three days after his investiture Justinian and his new wife, his showgirl-bride Theodora, were crowned together as joint emperor and empress. Enjoying a flurry of revived interest in the twenty-first century, Empress Theodora deserves every moment of her late-found fame. Now honoured as a saint by the Greek Orthodox Church, this player in Constantinople’s history has not been universally loved: ‘This degenerate woman [Theodora] was another Eve who heeded the serpent. She was a denizen of the Abyss and mistress of Demons. It was she who, drawn by a satanic spirit and roused by diabolic rage, spitefully overthrew a peace redeemed by the blood of martyrs,’ wrote Cardinal Baronius. Our most detailed source for Theodora’s life is a lascivious, spittle-flecked diatribe, a Secret History written by our key source for Justinian and Theodora’s reign, Procopius (Procopius would write both hagiographies and damnations of the imperial couple and their works). Clearly gorged with literary and rhetorical tropes, Procopius’ account has to be taken with a large amphora of salt – but many of the details ring true both for the age and as a backstory to the remarkable life of this girl from Constantinople.

The very recent character of these events, of this genocide, must be stressed. We tend to assume that the world we grow up with has always been in existence, so that it can be difficult to realize just how remarkable present-day conditions might look to someone from the past. This is especially true of the region we call the Middle East, which many Westerners see as an overwhelmingly Muslim land that is sharply demarcated from the historically Christian West by the Bosporus. The city of Istanbul thus stands at the far western limits of the Islamic world. Within that world, which stretches east as far as India, no rival religions of any significance are believed to exist, with the obvious exception of the Jewish state of Israel. Such a vision would have puzzled an observer just a century ago, for whom the Middle East was characterized by bewildering religious diversity—an area in which Christians remained a familiar part of the social and cultural landscape.