What is Constantinople called today?

Byzantion, the Greek town

The story starts in the 600s BC, when Greek colonists from Megara, near Athens, settled the tip of a peninsula where the Bosporus meets the Sea of Marmara. Tradition dates it to 667 BC and gives them a leader named Byzas, though the name Byzantion may be older, Thracian rather than Greek. Romans wrote it Byzantium. Herodotus tells how a Persian general, Megabazus, called the people of Chalcedon, just across the strait, blind: they had settled there seventeen years earlier, with this far better site sitting empty in front of them. Around AD 200 the city was briefly even Augusta Antonina, after Emperor Septimius Severus razed it, rebuilt it and named it for his son.

Constantinople, the New Rome

In 330 Constantine dedicated the rebuilt city as his capital (why he built it). Its Greek name, Konstantinoupolis, means the city of Constantine. It was also New Rome. In 381 a church council ranked the bishop of Constantinople second only to the bishop of Rome, because Constantinople was New Rome, and the title has never been dropped: the Ecumenical Patriarch, who still lives in Istanbul’s Fener district, is styled Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome.

Its own people usually said simply the City, hē Polis, or the Queen of Cities. Neighbors had their own names. Slavs called it Tsargrad, the emperor’s city. Viking traders called it Miklagard, the great stronghold. Arabs called it al-Qustantiniyya.

Where Istanbul comes from

Istanbul is not a name the Turks invented in 1453. It comes from everyday medieval Greek: stin Poli, in the City, or into the City, the way people spoke of going into town. Turkish speakers heard the phrase as one word. Other Turkish place names grew from Greek phrases the same way, such as İznik from Nicaea and İzmit from Nicomedia. Forms of the name appear in Armenian and Arabic writers from the 900s on, centuries before the conquest.

After 1453 the Ottomans used both names. Kostantiniyye, the Arabic form of Constantinople, appeared on coins and formal documents, while Istanbul was the everyday name; the Ottoman constitution of 1876 calls the capital İstanbul. Mehmed II also took the title Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of Rome (the fall of 1453). That word Rum, Roman, is still alive: the Turkish state calls the Greek Orthodox patriarch the Rum patriarch of Fener.

Istanbul today

The Ottoman sultanate ended in 1922, and in 1923 the new Turkish Republic made Ankara its capital. In 1928 Turkey switched to the Latin alphabet, and from 1930 it asked other countries to use Turkish names for Turkish cities. Governments, post offices and newspapers followed; the US State Department switched to Istanbul in May 1930. In 1953, on the 500th anniversary of the conquest, The Four Lads had a gold record with the novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” Greeks still say Konstantinoupoli, or just i Poli.

Today Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city, with more than 15 million people on both sides of the Bosporus, in Europe and in Asia. The site of the Greek town is the point called Sarayburnu, under and around Topkapı Palace. Was Byzantium the same place as Constantinople? Yes: one city, renamed, on the same ground.