Few cities have suffered more from brochure-induced amnesia than Istanbul. To the passing tourist—armed with a Lonely Planet and a taste for Turkish delight—it is a sensual muddle of spice bazaars and minarets, where East and West flirt politely across the Bosphorus.
But beneath this Ottoman–cum–global patina lies a more obstinate truth: Constantinople, the Queen of Cities, whose imperial skeleton still props up the modern metropolis.
Founded by Constantine the Great in AD 330 as Nova Roma, the city was never new and never merely Roman. The city was a palimpsest of ambition and theology, Rome’s eastern doppelgänger, and for centuries the largest, richest, and most inconveniently-situated Christian city in Europe. Even now, as ferries wheeze across the straits and glass towers jostle for attention, the ghost of Byzantium lingers.
The fall of Constantinople
In 1453, after a 55-day siege conducted with grim Ottoman efficiency, Constantinople finally succumbed to Sultan Mehmed II. The city, having survived Crusaders, iconoclasts, and its own theological hair-splitting, was at last undone. Mehmed, ever the theatrical heir, entered the ruins and promptly knelt before Hagia Sophia in a display of piety.
He fancied himself a latter-day Caesar, which was not entirely inaccurate. He patched the walls, revived the aqueducts, and repopulated the palaces with scholars, calligraphers, and other imperial accessories. Thus, from the ashes of Constantinople emerged an Ottoman phoenix—gaudier, more assertive, and no less imperial.
The city became Istanbul, a name derived from the Greek eis tan polin (into the city). Even linguistically, the Byzantines proved hard to evict. Their culture lingered like incense in the Hagia Sophia, perfuming the new regime with base notes of the old.
The remnants of Byzantium
For the modern traveller, the city’s Byzantine heart still beats, if one knows where to listen and is willing to ignore the sounds of the traffic.
Begin, inevitably, with Hagia Sophia. Beneath its Ottoman calligraphy panels and LED lighting—an ecclesiastical upgrade of dubious taste—fragments of old Constantinople still gleam. Look closely and you’ll find the imperial monograms of Justinian and Theodora carved into marble balustrades, and faint traces of Christian mosaics—angels, emperors, and the Virgin herself—peering through the thin veil of plaster like tenants reluctant to vacate. The marble floor, worn smooth by centuries of sandals, still carries the subtle dip of imperial processions.
If the queues are long (and they are), buy a simit from one of the carts outside—a sesame ring unchanged since the days when Constantinople’s bakers supplied the Great Palace. It is, if one squints, a communion wafer for the city’s layered faiths. And if the crowds prove too much, there are other sanctuaries where Byzantium lingers on, often in near solitude and disrepair.
The Chora Church (now Kariye Mosque) hides in a quiet corner of Fatih, its mosaics so vivid they seem recently polished by angels. The Kalenderhane Mosque, once the Theotokos Kyriotissa Church, offers a more austere echo of Byzantine devotion, its brickwork still murmuring Latin and Greek if you close your eyes. The Zeyrek Mosque, formerly the Monastery of the Pantokrator, sprawls across the hillside of the fatih district. After the Hagia Sophia, it’s the largest Byzantine religious edifice in Istanbul, and doesn’t have the the queues.
Interrupted by roads and municipal indifference, the Theodosian Walls stretch across the city’s western edge like the spine of a slumbering colossus. Beneath the streets lies the Basilica Cistern, which was built in the reign of Justinian. Medusa head column bases betray a pagan nostalgia in the now Christian empire.
Elsewhere, Constantinople reappears in fragments: the Column of the Goths, standing in Gülhane Park with all the confidence of a relic no one quite remembers; the Forum of Theodosius—rather tragically—now mostly a traffic island; the Column of Arcadius, buried beneath layers of urban ignorance. The Arap Camii Mosque, once a Dominican church, reveals early Italian Gothic architectural style. The orphanage of Hagios Paulos (Yetimhanesi) survives in name and faint outline, a reminder that even Byzantium had a safety net. The Hebdomon Hippodrome, once the site of imperial parades, is now a suburb with little connection.
Even the St George Armenian Church, tucked discreetly into the streets of Samatya, whispers of Constantinople’s pluralism.
And yet, beyond stone and marble, Byzantium endures. Its spirit seeps into the city’s kitchens, its music, its melancholy. The empire survives not in triumph, but in texture and the quiet insistence that history is never quite over. And can always return with a vengeance.
Byzantium beyond the stone
Byzantium endures not only in its monuments, but in its food, music, art, and in an emotion so distinct the Turks have a word for it.
In the old Greek quarter of Fener, narrow lanes still echo with the traces of Constantinople’s vanished cosmopolitanism. Behind weathered façades, a few Greek families remain as living reminders of a city that once spoke Greek, Armenian, Ladino, and Turkish with equal fluency. The Patriarchate of Constantinople still conducts its ancient liturgy in Byzantine Greek. The incense and chant that drift through its courtyard feel like an unbroken thread to Justinian’s time.
The Blessing of the Waters (Megas Agiasmos) ceremony in Istanbul dates directly back to the liturgical practices of old Constantinople and remains one of the most vivid continuations of Byzantine tradition. Each January, on the Feast of Epiphany, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch casts a silver cross into the Bosphorus, and young men dive after it. In the Byzantine Empire, the same rite was a grand state and religious event: the Emperor, the Patriarch, and the entire imperial court would process in great splendour from Hagia Sophia to the shore.
For the small remaining Greek Orthodox community, the ceremony is now an act of spiritual devotion and cultural continuity, connecting them directly to their ancestors. And for modern Greeks more broadly, it is Byzantium, not the marble age of Homer and Pericles, that feels closest to the heart. The empire’s liturgy, language, and music shape Greek identity far more intimately than any echo from the Bronze Age.
You can still taste Byzantium, too, if you know where to eat. The börek, with its layers of flaky pastry, is cousin to the Byzantine plakounta (“placenta cake”). Honey and nuts in syrup — now called baklava — once graced the imperial kitchens of Constantinople. Even the everyday simit, that sesame ring sold from red carts on every corner, descends from a bread baked in the medieval city. And in the meze plates of mastic, olives, and herbs you can taste what the Byzantines passed to both Venice and the Levant.
Baklava | Layered with history
While the Byzantine kitchens of Constantinople certainly served a honey-and-nut pastry, the story of baklava stretches back even further. The earliest ancestor likely came from ancient Persia, where cooks layered nuts with sweetened flatbreads. The idea travelled west, was adopted by the Byzantines, and later transformed in the Ottoman Empire’s imperial kitchens. There, the paper-thin phyllo dough we know today was perfected, turning an ancient treat into the dessert now claimed by cultures from Greece to the Levant.
Music carries its own line of descent. The plaintive tones of the ney flute and the modal progressions of Ottoman classical music owe much to Byzantine chant, that same haunting interplay between lament and rapture. The city’s poets and writers have felt it too. Orhan Pamuk writes of hüzün in Istanbul: Memories of a City — a shared melancholy, born of loss and grandeur, that hangs over the Bosphorus like mist.
But hüzün has a political echo. The twentieth century brought waves of Turkish nationalism that sought to erase the city’s plural inheritance: Greeks were expelled, Armenians silenced, synagogues shuttered, churches converted or left to crumble. Yet Byzantium, as history shows, has a gift for afterlife. The empire that refused to die has found ways to haunt its conquerors, whispering through the very language that tried to replace it.
Ghosts of language
Centuries of coexistence left Byzantine traces in speech as well as stone. Turkish and the old Constantinopolitan Greek dialect (*Polítika*) still carry echoes of the empire. Everyday Turkish borrows from Greek — liman (port), fener (lantern), pazar (market), kundura (shoe) — while Istanbul Greeks preserve Byzantine words long vanished from mainland Greece: mnísko (“to dwell”), pástra (“cleanliness”), kundurás (“shoemaker”). Even the city’s own name, İstanbul, comes from the Greek eis tin polin — “to the City.”
The Afterlife of the Byzantines
What happened to the Byzantines? Their story didn’t end with the collapse of Byzantium. When its people fled, they carried the learning of the city with them.
When Constantinople fell, its spirit did not perish; it simply migrated west. Scholars, artists, and priests fled across the Aegean carrying manuscripts, icons, and a blueprint to rebuild their civilisation. They found their mirror city in the lagoons of the Adriatic, Venice, that improbable maritime republic rising out of the sea. If Constantinople was the last of ancient Rome, Venice became its reincarnation: a new Byzantium built on trade rather than theology. Continuity came disguised as defeat. Byzantium’s fall became its metamorphosis. The displaced civilisation reinvented itself as mercantile empire.
The parallels were no accident. The earliest doges borrowed their ceremony from imperial Byzantium; the city’s basilicas gleamed with mosaics made by Greek artisans, and the very heart of St Mark’s glitters with the Pala d’Oro — a Byzantine masterpiece of gold and enamel carried west from Constantinople. Even the bronze Horses of St Mark, spirited from the Hippodrome during the Fourth Crusade, stand as trophies of that inheritance. Venice’s political structure, half-sacred and half-commercial, mirrored Constantinople’s own balance between altar and empire. The Venetians called themselves heirs to both Rome and the East, and for a long time they succeeded where Byzantium had failed.
For all its glittering façades, Venice was no fragile museum of lost glory. It was a city perpetually on the defensive — hemmed in by jealous Italian rivals to the west and the resurgent Turks to the east. So it built what Byzantium had lacked in the end: a navy capable of both protection and projection. Its fleet ruled the Adriatic and extended deep into the Dalmatian coast, Greece, and Cyprus. The Serenissima transformed maritime insecurity into empire.
Trade routes followed. The Silk Road, once terminating in Constantinople, was redirected through Venetian hands. Spices, silks, and gold poured into its quays. The heirs of a fallen Christian empire became rich beyond measure and their wealth helped finance the Renaissance.
Even the Republic’s sense of theatre, its ornate processions and masked rituals, was inherited from the Byzantine love of spectacle. Venice kept the pageantry, the ceremony, and the conviction that beauty itself could be a form of politics.
By the time Europe awoke from the Middle Ages, it was Byzantium — refracted through Venetian glass — that glittered in its eyes.
History, as someone once observed, contains no full stops — only commas, ellipses, and the occasional pause for breath. Byzantium did not vanish in 1453; it simply altered its accent. Venice, Florence, Moscow, even the Ottoman court itself — all spoke, in different tongues, the language of that lost empire. And Istanbul, for all its later neglect or animosity to its Byzantine inheritance, remains shaped by it. The domes, the melancholy, the sense of grandeur are part of the city’s genetic code.
The confluence of East and West
Istanbul has always been less a city than a tension — a living argument between continents. Europe and Asia meet here not in reconciliation but in perpetual courtship, exchanging glances across the Bosphorus.
On one shore, cafés serve third-wave coffee beneath the domes of Byzantine churches; on the other, fishermen cast their lines beside neon billboards in Arabic script. The skyline itself is an act of negotiation — minarets rising where bell towers once stood, apartment blocks jostling for space with relics of empire. It is the only city in the world where the language of saints and sultans still murmurs beneath the din of car horns and construction drills.
Istanbul’s vitality lies precisely in its refusal to resolve itself. The Ottoman absorbed the Byzantine; the secular modern absorbed the Ottoman; and now the global metropolis absorbs them all, layering identity upon identity like sediment in the Golden Horn. Even its melancholy, that untranslatable hüzün, is born of this layering: the weight of too much history pressing on the present.
Walk through Karaköy or Balat and you feel the paradox: kebab smoke mingling with incense, hipsters photographing ancient arches, graffiti scrawled on a fifth-century wall.
In this, Istanbul is neither a museum of the East nor a frontier of the West, but the mirror through which both glimpse themselves. The Bosphorus may divide continents, but the city presents their dreams and delusions with equal flair.
If history has a lesson, it is that nothing truly vanishes — not empires, not faiths, certainly not ideas. Istanbul knows this better than any place on earth. Each new epoch has left behind a trace of its former self, folded invisibly into the next.
Istanbul now flirts with global modernity and nostalgia in equal measure. The neglect of Byzantium was once a kind of national amnesia, but Constantinople, cloaked in minarets and motorways, still dreams in Greek.
