The Only City That Was Capital of Two Empires Without Ever Moving

Byzantium, the Greek colony that started it all

The official story begins around 667 BC, when a group of Greek colonists from Megara crossed the Bosphorus led by a colonist named Byzas. Legend has it that before setting out they consulted the oracle at Delphi, who told them to found the city "opposite the land of the blind" — a clue that only made sense once they arrived: earlier colonists had founded Chalcedon on the opposite shore, overlooking a far better spot just a short distance away. Byzas took that better site and gave it his own name: Byzantium.

Constantinople: the name not even its founder wanted

In the year 330 AD, Emperor Constantine dedicated the new capital of the Roman Empire over the ruins of Byzantium and officially named it "Nova Roma" — New Rome. The name never caught on: already in Constantine's own lifetime, everyone preferred to call it "the city of Constantine" — Constantinople. Under that name, unofficial but universal, the city was for more than a thousand years the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, the one we know today as the Byzantine Empire.

1453: the empire changes, the capital doesn't

On 29 May 1453, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople and put an end to more than a thousand years of Byzantine continuity. The unusual part isn't the conquest, but what Mehmed decided to do afterward: instead of raising a new capital somewhere else, as almost any other conqueror would have done, he kept the same city. Constantinople became, without moving an inch, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. No other place on earth has been the seat of two such different empires, one after the other, on the very same ground.

The name the street used long before the paperwork did

For almost five centuries of Ottoman rule, official documents and coinage kept using "Kostantiniyye," an Ottoman form of Constantinople. On the street, meanwhile, a shorter, more colloquial name had been current for generations: Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire dissolved in 1922, and the new Turkish Republic was born in 1923 with the capital moved to Ankara: for the first time since the year 330, the city stopped being anyone's capital. Only in 1930, by then without that title, did Atatürk's government formalize what the street had been saying for generations: it decreed that the single official name would be Istanbul.

Where does "Istanbul" come from? The leading theory

The word "İstanbul" has generated several hypotheses. One is a popular Ottoman etymology, "İslambol" ("full of Islam"), which the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi already recorded as a current name in the 17th century — but which modern linguistics doesn't support as the word's real origin. The theory with the strongest academic consensus points in another direction, much older and considerably less religious: it would derive from the medieval Greek phrase "eis tin polin" (εἰς τὴν πόλιν), which simply means "toward the city" or "to the city." For the Greeks living around Constantinople, this was simply "the City" — no need to call it anything else — and that endlessly repeated phrase gradually wore down in the mouths of Turkish speakers until it became "İstanbul." If the hypothesis holds, the name that sounds most Turkish of the three is, at its root, as Greek as Byzantium itself.