Istanbul was Constantinople, Constantinople was Byzantium...

And Clio is off on an adventure!

Hello and welcome (back),

I hope you’re well wherever you are. This week it is time for a bit of an annoucement. Those of you who have been reading for a while might have noticed a couple of shorter posts in the last couple of weeks. Some of you have sent me messages (thank you!). I have really enjoyed reading and thinking about them and will get back to you, but haven’t yet. I confess, there has been A LOT going on.

I can’t talk about all of it this week but I can talk about some of it and I hope you’ll forgive me a few busy weeks. Because Clio is… off to Istanbul!

Strictly speaking, Clio, as the Muse herself, isn’t so much off to Istanbul as permanently resident there. It is the main reason I love the city so much. Along with a few other deeply ancient, still-living cities that I’ve visited (Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Xi’an) and some I can’t wait to (Varanasi and Alexandria are top of my list), Istanbul exhales history with every breath. Each district is a distinctive blend of different pasts. The hilly landscape makes it even easier to see how thousands of years pile up and interlock.

But, in my guise here as a humble and imperfect avatar of Clio, I am off to Istanbul in September to spend 9 months at ANAMED, Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi, or the Center for the Study of Anatolian Civilizations. It is a research centre at Koç University and I couldn’t be more excited. Over many years I’ve visited Istanbul, have friends and colleagues there and have visited the ANAMED centre once before for an event, but whenever I’ve visited Istanbul, a few days or a week has never felt long enough.

I’ll keep you up to date with the project I’m working on there (which is to do with coins, obviously!!) but for now, a celebration for those of you who have been, a glimpse or a temptation if you haven’t: what makes Istanbul such a special historian’s home?

Constantinople was Byzantium

It doesn’t scan to any tune I know, so no ear worms yet, but Constantinople was, indeed, Byzantium, or Byzantion (usually pronounced VyzANdion, if you want to sound like a Byzantinist) to give it its Greek spelling. The history of the site right on the Bosphorus, where two continents reach out their fingertips to one another, though, is much older than that.

I could have picked any map of Istanbul from the thousands online but I think this one from 1958 is rather pretty. The main points are the same whichever one you look at though: this is a city defined by water, which surrounded the old centre (left) on three sides, making it highly defensible. However, there has always been settlement on the other shores, which have also been linked by water during peace time. The city also sits at the meeting point of Europe (left) and Asia (right).

Archaeologists have identified Neolithic remains dating to around 8000 years ago. At this time, the place we now know as Istanbul was westward from a crescent-shaped sweep of land where people were experimenting with more settled types of agriculture and living together in permanent villages rather than temporary camps. The experiments began around 11,000 years ago and gradually spread outwards.

This map shows, in green, where settled farming is thought to have developed. the blue arrows show where it seems to have spread from out of each of those centres. the green bits were most parallel developments (i.e. they happened largely independently, rather than one causing another), though there were connections between many of them. What is now Istanbul was along the blue arrow leading west from the green blob right in the middle of this map, the so-called Fertile Crescent.

About 7500-5500 years ago, new experiments were taking place. The site of Fikirtepe, a mound or ‘tell’ (more below!) shows people living on the Asian site of the Bosphorus when people began using copper for the first time, from making tools to weapons to jewellery. As a result, it is a period often known as the Bronze Age from the most common alloy that people made out of copper: adding a little tin to the mix makes the copper harder.

Across these centuries, people throughout the Eastern Mediterranean also often lived on sites generation after generation, literally building on the buildings of the people who had gone before them. The result was the creation of tells. These can look like cone-shaped, or flat-topped hills but, when excavated, turn into time capsules, revealing layer upon layer of changing habits, fashions and lifestyles.

This habit of living on top of the past isn’t unique to this region or period, of course. That’s why digging downwards is at the heart of archaeology! But tells are distinctive for their density of settlement usually on a comparatively small area, causing them to rise so noticeably from the landscape around them. In other places and times where populations were quite small (most tells would probably have housed a few hundred or perhaps a couple of thousand people at any one time) people might have decided every so often to stop building right on top of older levels and just to move a couple of miles away. It is the fact that people just kept going up and up that makes tells such remarkable sites.

Tell Barri, in modern Syria, is a classic tell, rising up above the surrounding ground. It is over 100 feet high and covers an area of around 91 acres, representing centries of human settlement on a single site.

Then, around 3000 years ago, there was a settlement on the western or European side of the Bosphorus. The Roman author Pliny, several centuries later, said that the ancient name of the site had been Lygos, so that may have been its name. Certainly, the river that ran through the city through the Middle Ages, fits this hypothesis as it was called the River Lykos.

And so, finally, in around c. 660 BCE (2685 years ago), Lygos and whatever those people living in Fikirtepe or the Neolothic farmers before them called the places they lived, became Byzantion. I’ve written before about Greek settlement in the first millennium CE, creating an imperial sphere often called Magna Greacia, or ‘Greater Greece’ and Byzantion was one of those places. Its location, right on waterways connecting the Black Sea and the Aegean (and thence, the Mediterranean) made it a great place for trade, which is how a lot of cities in Magna Graecia became rich. Byzantion was no exception.

The Greek-speaking city was part of various military and political alliances, was briefly conquered by Persia and then became cosy with a new power expanding in the Mediterranean: a little place by the name of Rome. By 73 CE, Byzantion, perhaps better known from this point by its Latin name, Byzantium, became an official part of the Roman Empire, though it got into political difficulty a few generations later when, in 195 (a disrupted time for the Romans!), it backed the wrong candidate in a battle to be emperor. The city was besieged for two years then the winning candidate sacked the city for good measure. Within five years, though, the empire was back in a more stable place politically and Byzantium got a major redevelopment.

You know how this one goes… Istanbul was Constantinople¹

The story of how Byzantium became Constantinople is something else I’ve written about before (and also a bit here) and it is the story mainly of a man who was never afraid to blow his own trumpet. In the early 4th century, the Roman emperor Constantine I took over the whole of the empire after many years of there being several competing (and even sometimes collaborating!) emperors. In the process, though, he had annoyed the aristocrats in Rome, which was, in any case, a bit far from the frontlines of the empire as these had developed over the centuries.

So, Constantine decided to move the capital, permanently. The site he chose was Byzantium. It was close to the eastern frontier and very easily denfensible. Constantine remade the city: new walls, squares, wide open streets, palaces and public buildings, with a confetti of statues and antiquities from all over the empire. He didn’t even have time to put all of them up…

This obelisk was originally carved and erected in Egypt by the Pharoah Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 BCE) then brought by Constantine, probably in the 320s or 330s, to decorate his ‘new’ city but apparently he didn’t have time to actually put it up. It just lay around for about 40 years or so until it was eventually put up in the middle of the hippodrome or chariot-racing arena by Theodsius I (r. 379-395 CE).

And, of course, Constantine changed the name of his city from Byzantium to the City of Constantine, or Constantinoupolis: Constantinople.

As a Byzantinist, that is the city I originally went to see and have been back to so often since. From the enormous, bedazzling Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia) with its mosaic decorations to the Archaeological Museum’s second-floor gallery of Byzantine carvings, water pipes and wall inscriptions, to the great walls that made the city impregnable for centuries and the Chora, perhaps the most mind-bogglingly dense decorative programme I have ever seen on a building outside the temple towers of South India, and the basilica cistern that I wrote about not that long ago, Byzantine Constantinople is a layer in the history of Istanbul that oozes richness and fascination. I’ll be bringing you more of its sights from September, from mundane brick stamps to palace mosaics.

Here it is… the first time I saw the Aya Sofya in October 2010.

Eess teen Polin, into the city

There are other Istanbuls, though. I’ve talked about ancient Byzantion/Byzantium, also on display in the Archaeological Museum and visible in other places, too, most obviously the aqueduct of Valens, completed in 373, that marches through the city and once brought fresh water over 160 miles from the surrounding hills. Fikirtepe has been swallowed by the city so that you can only tell there was once a tell if you know where to look in the archaeological literature, but I’m looking forward to going there anyway. And that is not least because it sits in one of the most interesting parts of of Ottoman Istanbul, the modern district of Kadıköy.

The aqueduct of Valens. It is hard to miss that you’re somewhere a bit special as you move around Istanbul.

Now, you may (or may not) have wondered how Constantinople did, in fact, become Istanbul, not politically but linguistically. Politically, the change is usually considered to have happened when Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453 and made the city the new capital of his Ottoman Empire. Since 1300, the Ottomans had been establishing themselves as the major power in the East Mediterranean. By conquering ‘Rum’ as they called Constantiople and the Byzantine Empire (meaning ‘Rome’, as in the transferred capital of the old empire), they became the unquestioned masters of the region. But language is a slower, more organic thing.

To understand this change, you have to start with what people actually said, rather than what things are officially called. ‘Constantinoupolis’ is a bit of a mouthful. And anyway, Constantinople was so much the centre of all political and economic life in Byzantium and, for people living nearby it was so obviously the only city you could possibly mean, that most people didn’t bother with the ‘Constantinou’ bit. (Don’t feel bad for Constantine. He’s in no danger of history forgetting about him!) Instead, they would simply say they were going ‘into the city’, εἰς τὴν Πόλιν, or as Greek was roughly pronounced in the 15th century, ‘ees teen Polin’. It was this phrase, or so I was told by a philologist many years ago, that eventually became the new name of the city, ‘Istanbul’.²

Ottoman Istanbul is all around you in the city. The Blue Mosque (or the Sultan Ahmed Mosque) squares up to the Aya Sofya across a beautiful open plaza. Minarets sprout from newly built Ottoman projects and from Byzantine churches transformed into mosques. One of the most beautiful sights in the world is the European side of the city at the sunset call for prayer from the medieval Galata Tower on the other side of the Golden Horn. Istanbul pours down its hills to the glittering sea.

There are narrow, cobbled streets in the old city centre with their bright orange roof tiles and if, like me, you’re a foodie, it is the Ottoman legacy that stands out most clearly in the incredible variety and sheer deliciousness of Turkish cuisine. There are a few restaurants in Istanbul that specialise in historic Ottoman cooking, using old recipe books to create feasts that once graced the tables of the Topkapı Palace.

The Ottomans were also a modernising empire, though, and outside the historic centre of the city where, as in every very ancient place, the possibilities for being new must be juggled with the significance of what is old, there is also an Ottoman Istanbul of universities, technical colleges, hospitals and transport infrastructure. One of the places we can’t wait to visit is Haydarpaşa Terminal in Kadıköy, opened in 1872. Its recent history has been precarious, with fire damage and abandonment threatening the building but it remains an impressive building perched right against the water.

Haydarpaşa Station, built in 1872.

And we’ll definitely be dropping into the historic Sirkeçi Station, which is now the Istanbul Railway Museum, a building in a very different style but also opened in 1872 (in fact, Sirkeçi came first in July, with Haydarpaşa opening a few months later in September).

The facade of Sirkeçi Station.

Making History in a Historic City

And then there is modern Istanbul. When Türkiye became an independent Republic on 29th October 1923, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul was not the new capital city. Ankara, further inland and more central in the new nation state was chosen. It was a chance for a fresh start but overshadowing Istanbul was never likely and has never happened. (I should say, I absolutely love Ankara and have, so far, spent more time there than in Istanbul. They are very different places and both wonderful!)

Istanbul is still the biggest city in Türkiye by a wide margin (17 million inhabitants to Ankara’s 5). If you play travel board/card games you’ll know that Türkiye is usually represented by the Aya Sofya or the Blue Mosque… If you talk to people in Türkiye who are not from Istanbul, you’ll often hear the same resentment that attaches to every enormous city that seems to suck in light and heat from all around it and project it back outwards as a dazzling sense of self (and self-satisfaction). I definitely feel some of that about London, so, much as I adore Istanbul, I do understand why lots of Turks from anywhere else in the country say that they don’t!

Fikirtepe/Lygos/Byzantion/Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul has been a site where people have made homes and history for 8000 years. In that time it has been a capital and a prize, a village, a provincial city and a regional centre. It was old already when Constantine ‘rebuilt’ it, over 1600 years ago, preserving many of its earlier monuments. For as long as it has been written about it has been historic and, for a historian, such places are like a thinning of the world, where the present and many pasts jostle up against each other and every bend in the street is a new vista on old choices.

So, bear with me over the next few months. I’ve got plenty of things I want to talk to you about and lots of inspiring places to go but there will be a lot going on in the background and all of it leading to a new set of adventures that I can’t wait to share with you!

1. If you don’t know the incredibly catchy, and therefore unbelievably annoying song I’m referring to, click here at your own peril.

2. So excited was I when that philologist explained this to me that I immediately wrote it all down and emailed it to a fellow medievalist who was, at the time, a good friend and fellow coin nerd. We had a habit of mailing each other every 9 months to a year for about a decade, apologising for the delay but never giving up altogether. He still has that email (his record keeping it much better than mine) and we’re getting married in July so Eess teen Polin has its own very special place in our hearts.