Half Asian, Wholly European

A colony named Byzantion was founded on the land of present-day Istanbul in 667 BC by an Athenian named Byzas. Placed between Thrace and the Balkans to the west and Anatolia to the east, the region's history seems defined by almost incessant conflict. By the time Alexander the Great took Byzantion in 334 BC, it had already lived under three different foreign rulers: Lydian, Persian, and Athenian.

Byzantium came under Roman control in 64 BC and served as an important administrative center for the eastern parts of the empire until Constantine the Great moved his capital there from Rome in 330 AD. The city, renamed New Rome, was more commonly called Constantinople. Constantine's successor divided the empire between his two sons in 395 AD and when the western half fell to the Europeans in 476 AD, Constantinople became the sole center of Roman power.

Aside from the fifty-eight year period when the Latins of the Fourth Crusade controlled it, Constantinople remained free, albeit in decline until 1453. The Ottomans had been chipping away at Byzantium possessions to the east since Osman I declared their independence in 1301. On May 29th, 1453 Sultan Mehmet II finally took Constantinople and begin rebuilding what he had just took so much time to destroy. Instead of starting from scratch, many of the old Byzantine churches were converted to mosques and still exist in roughly their original proportions today.

The Ottomans controlled Constantinople with widely varying levels of competence until the Sultanate was abolished in 1922 with the declaration of the secular Turkish republic, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasa, also known as Ataturk (Father of the Turks). The issue of a secular republic ruling a Muslim majority is a large issue for modern-day Turkey. The first few pages of the Turkish Daily News normally contain at least two stories about government conduct in relation to religious beliefs.

Istanbul feels like a European city, not only because of all the European tourists, but because the buildings are well maintained, the streets are clean, and the people have a sophisticated fashion sense. The cleanliness was a pleasant shock after ten weeks in Asia.

Istanbul stradles the south end of the Bosporus, the waterway that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. Central Istanbul, which holds the highest concentration of historical sights, sits on the western side.

I stayed in Sultanahmet, a district built over and around some of the oldest pieces of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture. After a bit of a fiasco where I found that the hotel I had chosen no longer existed, I checked in to a small, family run hostel literally in the shadow of the Haghia Sofia, or Church of Holy Wisdom. The Blue Mosque was a mere two hundred yards further south, and the Topkapi Palace, overlooking the Bosporus, just a little further to the east. The Bazar Quarter is immediately west of Sultanahmet and an inlet called the Golden Horn separates this section of Istanbul from the busy Beyoglu district to the north.