Üsküdar and the Princes’ Islands - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 381

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Üsküdar and
the Princes' Islands
Visitors to Istanbul sometimes forget that an important part of the
city is located in another continent, across the way in Asia. The most
interesting of these Anatolian suburbs from the point of view of
historical monuments is Üsküdar, which lies directly opposite the
mouth of the Golden Horn.
Üsküdar was anciently known as Chrysopolis, the City of Gold,
founded by the Athenians under Alcibiades in 409 B.C. Chrysopolis
was in antiquity a suburb of the neighbouring and more important
town of Chalcedon, the modern Kadıköy, now itself a suburb of the
great city across the strait. According to tradition, Chalcedon was
founded in about 687 B.C., two decades before the original settlement
of Byzantium. Chrysopolis, because of its fine natural harbour and
its strategic location at the head of the strait, began to develop rapidly
and later surpassed Chalcedon in size and importance. Chrysopolis
became the starting place for the great Roman roads which led from
Byzantium into Asia and was a convenient jumping-of place for
military and commercial expeditions into Anatolia. Throughout the
Byzantine period it was a suburb of Constantinople and thus had
much the same history as the capital. Its site was not well-suited
for defence, however, and it was on several occasions occupied and
destroyed by invading armies while Constantinople remained safe
behind its great walls. For this reason there are no monuments
from the Byzantine period remaining there. The town was taken by
the Turks in the middle of the fourteenth century, more than 100
years before the fall of Constantinople. (The Byzantine name Scutari,
of which the modern Turkish Üsküdar is merely a corruption,
dates from the twelfth century and derives from the imperial palace
of Scutarion, which was at the point of land near Leander's