The Berkeley Guides:
Berkeley Guide to Europe:
Turkey:
!Rstanbul
Istanbul is in the midst of remaking itself, a process that has continued on and off for the past 1,600 years, throughout the city's history as Greek Byzantium, Roman Constantinople, and Ottoman and Turkish Istanbul. Originally settled by Mycenaeans, Byzantium became Constantinople when the Roman emperor Constantine moved the capital of his empire there in ad 305. Recast as Islamic Istanbul following Ottoman conquest and largely rebuilt by Ottoman sultans, the city retained its function as administrative capital of an illustrious empire until Atatürk decided to break with the past and make the town of Ankara the capital of his modern Turkish republic in 1923. Today the city is asserting its influence in the eastern Mediterranean and around the Black Sea, as evidenced by an onslaught of opportunity-seeking immigrants from Eastern Europe and mystically inclined tourists from the West. The current attempt to pull Istanbul into the financial ranks of the Western European capitals involves tearing up streets and bringing the bridges up to at least 19th-century standards. Despite these heady stabs at making Istanbul a city of the future, the town is incorrigibly old-fashioned. Some avenues carry massive amounts of whirring traffic, but back streets are filled with artisans, vendors, children playing, and old men discussing the past over glasses of çi (tea). Domes and minarets fight hotels and telecommunications towers for skyline space.
The recent changes have left the city somewhere between charmingly fragmented and frustratingly unworkable. Muezzins, the Muslim criers who once called the faithful to prayer, have been replaced by recordings and public-address systems; pilgrims pile out of air-conditioned buses to camp by the walls of Topkapi Palace, and you can stand between the glorious Blue Mosque and the wondrous Hagia Sophia as you withdraw lunch money from the Yapi Kredi 24 ATM. Contradiction has always been one of Istanbul's defining characteristics, and locals take these latest developments in stride. So don't be disappointed if you find yourself sipping an espresso at a pseudo-French café off Istiklâl Caddesi rather than a drink poured from an ornate pot strapped to a man's back in the Sultanahmet. They're equally authentic Istanbul experiences.
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