History

With the Dors founding the city of Kalkedon (today's Kadikoy), Istanbul with two sides appears. Bosporus flowing between them! There is a mythological story about the Byzantines naming the Bosphorus as "Bosporus", meaning "cow pass" in ancient Greek.

In ancient Greek mythology, the god Zeus, married to the goddess Hera, falls in love with a princess named Io and begins to meet her secretly from his wife Hera. Hera suspects something and one day, when Zeus and Io are together, she makes a sudden raid on them. Zeus covers the surroundings with clouds to hide the situation, but Hera disperses these clouds in anger.

Realizing that he cannot prevent Hera, Zeus turns Io into a cow to hide him. This would not be enough for Hera's anger to subside. He asks his wife to give it to him as a gift, and a horse fly infests the cow. The cow, which hurts more than the bites of the fly, starts to run from place to place and the valley fills with water as it crosses from one continent to another. The strait known today as the Bosphorus is formed. Namely Bosporus: Cow pass. A slit made by the horns of the cow, which shakes its head in pain, is also covered with water, and the name of the place is the "golden horn", that is, the Golden Horn.

A history that doesn't fit in the pages

This city has a history that does not fit into the pages. But we can briefly describe it like this:

• The settlement on the historical peninsula, founded by the Megarians in the 7th century B.C, was called Byzantion. In 324 A.C., the Roman Emperor Constantine changed the name of the city to Constantinopolis (Constantine's City) and made the city the capital of the Roman Empire.
• In 537 A.C., Byzantine Emperor Justinian I started the construction of the Hagia Sophia church. This church became the largest church in the Byzantine Empire.
• In 1204 A.C., Istanbul was occupied by the Crusaders and the city was sacked.
• In 1453, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, conquered Istanbul at the age of 21 and the city became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Topkapi Palace was built in 1478 and Dolmabahce Palace was built in 1876. The empire, which ruled 3 continents until the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, was ruled from these two palaces.
• In 1923, with the founding of the Turkish Republic, Istanbul became one of the largest and most important cities in modern Turkey.
• After the 1950s, Istanbul experienced a rapid urban transformation and the city turned into the locomotive city of modern Turkey.