Istanbul: A City on Two Continents - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 201

14. Istanbul: A City on Two Continents
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “On Self-Reliance”
Istanbul is the only major city that sits on two continents, Europe and Asia. Its waterside
location gives it easy access to the world's great trade routes; as a consequence, it has been
fought over for 2,500 years. Even without knowing the city's history, the traveler in Istanbul
knows it to be a city of eras and epochs, one civilization layered over another, the remnant of
one culture nestled alongside and inside the remnants of another. Not so much a patchwork
of eras and epochs, the city is more like a fascinating mosaic.
The traveler also encounters a universe of faces, each of which reflects some distant
(and not so distant) genetic pool: the tall, blue-eyed Turk whose forebears may have been
Viking bodyguards to a Byzantine emperor; the broad, square forehead of a man whose fam-
ily emigrated from Egypt; the high cheekbones of an Albanian Slav whose family, long ago,
converted to Islam; the black skin of a person of Nubian ancestry; the face with almond
eyes, whose clan exploded out of Mongolia and onto Anatolia; the woman of delicate beauty
whose ancestor was a Circassian slave in a sultan's harem; and the Roman ace whose fore-
bear arrived in 334, when Constantine created the Eastern Roman Empire and built his cap-
ital in today's Istanbul. All these and others are Turkish faces whose predecessors came to
Istanbul sometime between 600 BCE and yesterday, from empires that once reached from
the Caspian Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
And long before the traveler will have seen Hagia Sophia and its minarets rising against
the morning mist, and long before the traveler's ship will have tied up in the Golden Horn,
the passenger to Istanbul will travel past some of the most important sites of the ancient
world. As the Michelin Guide for Motorists would say, “Worth a journey.”
The Ottoman Empire had its beginnings in 1308 when Turkish tribes first entered
Europe. In quick conquest they overran Greece, Bulgaria, and Bosnia, and from there, the
assault on Constantinople began. Using a huge bronze cannon, the walls of the city were
shattered. “A great iron chain was stretched across the Golden Horn” to prevent Christian
armies from coming to the relief of the city. [159] In a siege of eight weeks, the city was fi-
nally taken on May 29, 1453.
Turkey is an Islamic society. [160] Yet, with the overthrow of the sultanate in 1923, it has
honored Islam but has maintained a secular society. [161]
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM?
At the Aegean end of the Mediterranean lies the Strait of Dardanelles, forty miles long and
one to four miles wide. The Dardanelles is the place of the disastrous landing at Gallipoli by
British and French forces during the First World War. The peninsula of Gallipoli (Gelibolu)