The Bosporus Conundrum

Abstract

What is most striking in the taxi journey from the airport along Istanbul’s seaside avenue, with the Bosporus waters on the right, is a street sign as you approach the two bridges over the waterway, with an arrow pointing left reading ‘Europe’ and one pointing right reading ‘Asia’. The Bosporus, the waterway connecting the Caspian sea to the Mediterranean, is about two kilometres wide at its narrowest and heavy with maritime traffic. On its western shore is Europe, on its eastern shore is Asia. What may seem like a mere river in the middle of a city represents a real division between two worlds. Turkey literally has a foot on both sides. A small portion of its landmass, including its largest city, Istanbul, lies on the European side, where Turkey shares a frontier with Greece and Bulgaria, while most of the country lies in Asia, where it shares frontiers with Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Syria. Ankara, Turkey’s modern capital, is in Asia, in the region called Anatolia, but the most important city by far is Istanbul. This city, formerly known as Byzantium (originally a Greek fishing village named Byzantion) was established by Roman Emperor Constantine in ad 330 as the capital of the eastern half of a Roman empire that had been split in two to make its vastness more manageable.