Why Is Constantinople Now Called İstanbul?

When I was in seventh grade social studies class, we learned about how the city of Constantinople is now known as İstanbul. To make sure none of us ever forgot that Constantinople is İstanbul, my teacher played us the song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which was originally written in 1953 by Jimmy Kennedy and Nat Simon, but is best known today from a cover released in 1990 by the alternative rock band They Might Be Giants. In case you’ve never heard it, here’s a video with the song on YouTube:

One thing my seventh grade social studies teacher never explained, though, is the reason why Constantinople is now known as İstanbul. It’s not just because “people liked it better that way”; there are actually a number of complex and fascinating political reasons why the name was changed. The story involves a single city with a half dozen different names, a dozen different kings with the same name, World War I, and an especially vicious Barbary macaque.

A brief history of İstanbul’s many names

To understand the precise context of why the name was changed, let’s go back to the very beginning. The city of İstanbul has had many different names over the years. According to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 AD), the city that is now known as İstanbul was originally a Thrakian settlement known as Lygos. Sometime around 657 BC, though, a group of colonists from the Greek city-state of Megara came along and founded the city of Βυζάντιον (Byzántion) on the site.

The city remained known as Byzantion for nearly a thousand years. Like most of the rest of the Greek world, Byzantion came under Roman domination in around the second century BC. Nonetheless, like the rest of the eastern Mediterranean, even under Roman rule, it remained very culturally Greek; most of its inhabitants continued to speak the Greek language, identify as Greeks, and practice Greek culture.

In 192 AD, the city of Byzantion supported Pescennius Niger’s claim to the throne of the Roman Empire, leading the emperor Septimius Severus to sack and burn it. Upon taking the throne, he refounded the city, renaming it Augusta Antonina after his son Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who later became the emperor we know as “Caracalla.” Caracalla, however, turned out to be a bad emperor in the eyes of the Roman public, so the name quickly reverted back to Byzantion after the emperor’s assassination in 217 AD.

Then, in 330 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine I made Byzantion into the new capital of the Roman Empire and renamed it Nova Roma, which means “New Rome” in Latin. After Constantine I’s death, the city became known in Greek as Κωνσταντινούπολις (Kōnstantinoúpolis), which literally means “Constantine City.” The name Byzantion remained in use, but Constantinople became the primary name of the city.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the head of a colossal statue of the Roman emperor Constantine I, after whom the city of Constantinople takes its name, on display in the Capitoline Museums in Rome

The city of Constantinople remained the continuous capital of the Byzantine Roman Empire for around nine hundred years. It quickly became the largest city in the empire. By around the ninth century AD, whenever someone in the area around Constantinople wanted to say that they were going to Constantinople, they would simply use the Greek phrase εἰς τὴν Πόλιν (eis tḕn Pólin), which means “into the City,” since everyone knew that, when they said “the City,” they meant Constantinople.

This Greek expression is the root of the name İstanbul, which is first attested in Arabic and Armenian sources in the tenth century. The name eventually passed from Arabic into Turkish, becoming a common vernacular name for the city.

Constantinople was sacked by the western European knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The city remained under Latin occupation for a little over half a century until the Byzantine Romans managed to recapture it in July 1261 and reinstated it as their capital. It remained the Roman capital for the remainder of the empire’s history.

Finally, on 29 May 1453, Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks under the leadership of Sultan Mehmed II. Over the course of the years following the conquest, the Ottomans remade Constantinople into their new capital. For instance, as I discuss in this article from August 2020, they famously converted the Hagia Sophia, which had originally been constructed in the sixth century AD as a Christian church, into a mosque.

Contrary to popular belief, however, İstanbul didn’t immediately become the primary name of the city after the Turkish conquest. In fact, for most of the Ottoman period, the most official name for the city in the Turkish language was actually Kostantiniyye. This is the name that is used on Ottoman coins and that is used in most official documents. Meanwhile, in languages other than Turkish, the city remained universally known as Constantinople.

Thus, we are left with the question: “How did İstanbul become the primary, formal name of the city?”

ABOVE: Painting by the Greek painter Theofilos Chatzimichail of the final battle for the city of Constantinople on 29 May 1453

The Megali Idea and the Greco-Turkish War of 1897

In order to understand why İstanbul became the official name of Constantinople, we need to talk a little bit about Greek irredentism and the relationship between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, nearly all of Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Then, in 1821, the Greeks rebelled against their Turkish rulers. This was the beginning of a struggle lasting nearly a decade that ultimately resulted in the creation of the modern nation-state of Greece. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, the Greek nation-state was much smaller in terms of territory than it is today and many regions that were primarily inhabited by ethnically Greek people remained under Ottoman rule.

There was a concept in Greek politics at this time known as the Μεγάλη Ιδέα (Megáli Idéa), or “Big Idea,” which essentially held that all regions primarily inhabited by ethnically Greek people needed to be brought under the rule of the Greek state. This included the island of Krete, the region of Makedonia in what is now northern mainland Greece, the region of Thrake in what is now eastern mainland Greece and the western, European part of Turkey, and the entire west coast of Asia Minor.

Central to the Megali Idea was the notion that Constantinople was the rightful capital of Greece and that it needed to be reclaimed from the Turkish occupiers. In a famous speech before the Greek National Assembly in January 1844, Greek politician Ioannis Kolettis declared:

“The Kingdom of Greece is not Greece; it is merely a part: the smallest, poorest part of Greece. The Greek is not only he who inhabits the Kingdom, but also he who inhabits Ioannina, Salonika or Serres or Adrianople or Constantinople or Trebizond or Krete or Samos or any other region belonging to the Greek history or the Greek race. […] There are two great centres of Hellenism. Athens is the capital of the Kingdom. Constantinople is the great capital, the dream and hope of all Greeks.”

I suspect that a substantial number of people living in the regions that proponents of the Megali Idea wanted to claim for Greece didn’t really want to be ruled by Greece. Nonetheless, it is clear that many ethnically Greek people living in those regions did indeed want this.

In April 1897, the ethnically Greek inhabitants of the island of Krete rebelled against Ottoman rule, seeking union with Greece. This led Greece and the Ottoman Empire to go to war over the island. The commander of the Greek forces during this war was the crown prince of Greece, whose name was Konstantinos—the Greek form of Constantine.

The Turks won the war on the ground, but the western European imperialist powers intervened and forced Ottoman Empire to cede control over the island of Krete, which became an independent state under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. In 1908, Kretan authorities unilaterally declared union with Greece.

ABOVE: Greek lithograph from 1897 showing the Battle of Velestino

The Balkan Wars and World War I

On 8 October 1912, the First Balkan War broke out between the member states of the Balkan League—which was composed of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro—and the Ottoman Empire.

On 18 March 1913, while the war was still ongoing, Konstantinos—the same crown prince who had led the Greek forces in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897—became the king of Greece. Today, he is generally known as Konstantinos I of Greece, but, as I discuss in this article from July 2019, he actually preferred to style himself as Konstantinos XII, because he considered all the Roman emperors named “Constantine” to be his forebears.

Ultimately, the Balkan League won and, on 30 May 1913, the countries involved in the war signed the Treaty of London, which gave both the island of Krete and the region of Makedonia to Greece. Bulgaria wasn’t happy with its spoils, though, so, in June 1913, the Second Balkan War broke out, with Greece, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro on one side and Bulgaria on the other. This war lasted only a few months and was concluded on 10 August 1913 with the Treaty of Bucharest.

ABOVE: Aggrandized painting of King Konstantinos I of Greece on horseback during the Second Balkan War

World War I broke out in July 1914. King Konstantinos insisted on remaining neutral, but the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos was strongly in favor of Greece joining the war on the side of the Allies. On 11 June 1917, under domestic pressure from the Venizelist faction within Greece and foreign pressure from Britain and France, Konstantinos stepped down and fled the country along with his oldest son Georgios.

With the support of the Entente Powers, the Venizelists placed Konstantinos’s second-oldest son Alexandros on the throne as a puppet ruler, effectively stripping him of all powers. On 2 July 1917, Greece entered the war on the side of the Allies. The Allied Powers ultimately won the war and soon began dismantling what was left of the Ottoman Empire.

It was widely believed at the time that the Allied Powers would reward Greece for having sided with them by giving them control over most of the Ottoman Empire’s former territories in Europe—including perhaps even the city of Constantinople itself—and most of the west coast of Asia Minor. For many Greeks, it looked as though the Megali Idea was about to finally be realized.

ABOVE: Map of “Greater Hellas,” printed in 1920 or 1921, showing Greek territorial claims in Asia Minor following World War I

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the actual territorial expansion of Greece from 1832 to 1947

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919 – 1922

On 13 November 1918, the Allied forces of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Greece began occupying the city of Constantinople. On 15 May 1919, approximately twenty thousand Greek soldiers landed in Smyrna, a city on the western coast of Asia Minor where ethnic Greeks probably made up a bare majority of the population, and promptly seized control of the city.

Largely response to these occupations, a new movement known as the Turkish National Movement began to form. The movement was primarily based in central Turkey and its leader was the esteemed general Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Its essential ideology was that the Turkish homeland was under threat and that the Ottoman government in Constantinople was neither willing nor able to protect the homeland, so there needed to be a new government.

By April 1920, a treaty was beginning to take shape between the official government of the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Powers, known as the Treaty of Sèvres, which would have imposed far harsher conditions on the Ottoman Empire than had already been imposed on the German Empire. Under the conditions of the treaty, all of Eastern Thrake and the whole region of Asia Minor around the city of Smyrna would be given over directly to Greece and much of what is now northeastern Turkey would be given over directly to Armenia.

Furthermore, Greek, Italian, and French “zones of influence” would be carved out of what is now western Turkey and a “Kurdish region” would be established in southeastern Turkey. An international zone known as the “Zone of the Straits” would include the entire region around the Sea of Marmara, including the city of Constantinople. The treaty would have left Turkey as nothing more than a tiny rump state controlling basically only central northern Anatolia, with Ankara as its capital.

In response to the prospect of this treaty being ratified, in April 1920, the Turkish National Movement established the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara and declared their separation from the Ottoman government. The National Movement launched a military campaign to repel the Greek forces that had occupied Smyrna and the surrounding regions. This marked the beginning of a new Greco-Turkish War.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the partition of the Ottoman Empire according to the Treaty of Sèvres

At this point, a bizarre freak accident intervened in the course of history. On 2 October 1920, King Alexandros of Greece was walking through the grounds of the Tatoi Palace in Athens when he was attacked and bitten by a domestic Barbary macaque. The bite became infected and he developed sepsis. He died on 25 October.

Consequently, a plebiscite was held in Greece and the exiled Konstantinos I was reinstated as king on 19 December 1920. In March 1921, King Konstantinos went to Asia Minor to rally morale among the troops. He personally helped lead the Greek forces to victory in the Battle of Kütahya–Eskişehir in June of that year.

For a few months, it looked as though the Greeks were maybe going to win. Then, on 23 August, the Greek and Turkish forces confronted in the Battle of Sakarya, which went on for twenty-one days. By the time the battle ended on 13 September, it had become a resounding Turkish victory that turned the tide of the war in favor of the Turks and basically crushed Greek hopes of conquering Asia Minor.

The Greek invaders were forced into retreat. The Turks won a massive victory over the Greeks in the Battle of Dumlupınar in late August 1922 and, on 9 September, the Turks recaptured the city of Smyrna itself. Upon reassuming control, Turkish forces began to slaughter the Greek and Armenian inhabitants of the city and set fire to homes and businesses owned by Greek and Armenian civilians.

On 13 September, a great fire began to blaze out of control in the city. The inferno completely destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city and killed somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Greek and Armenian civilians. Somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 additional Greek and Armenian civilians were forced to flee their homes and take refuge in the waterfront, where they were forced to remain for weeks under harsh conditions.

In the end, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 Greek and Armenian refugees were evacuated, while 30,000 able-bodied Greek and Armenian men were deported to work camps in the Anatolian interior, where many of them died as a result of the harsh conditions or were executed.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Great Fire of Smyrna, which completely destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city and forced

The catastrophe at Smyrna was so devastating for Greek morale that, on 27 September 1922, King Konstantinos I abdicated the throne to his eldest son Georgios II. Meanwhile, the Turkish nationalists celebrated their victory. On 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey declared that the Ottoman state was abolished and that a new era in Turkish history had begun.

On 24 July 1923, the Allied Powers and the Turkish government ratified the Treaty of Lausanne, which officially ended the war between Turkey and the Allied Powers, annulled the terms of the previous Treaty of Sèvres, and defined the borders of the modern nation-state of Turkey. Under this new treaty, Turkey retained control over all of Asia Minor, as well as control over Constantinople and Eastern Thrake.

On 4 October 1923, the last Allied forces left the city of Constantinople and, on 6 October, Turkish forces entered the city with a triumphal ceremony. Despite the Turks regaining Constantinople, they chose to keep their capital at Ankara for symbolic reasons, to show that the old Ottoman way of governing was over and that the new government would be doing things differently.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the borders of Turkey as defined by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923

What does this have to do with İstanbul?

On 29 October 1923, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey proclaimed the establishment of the new Republic of Turkey. The new Kemalist government requested all foreign countries to stop using the name Constantinople and instead begin using the Turkish name İstanbul. From 1926 onwards, the Turkish post office began sending back all mail addressed to the city of İstanbul by any name other than İstanbul.

Why did they do this? Well, there are probably two reasons. One is because the Kemalists were nationalists and they evidently thought that the name İstanbul was more Turkish than the name Kostantiniyye—even though both names are actually of Greek etymology. Using a supposedly more Turkish name also helped the Turks to counter Greek irredentist claims about İstanbul being a rightfully Greek city.

The second reason is probably because, by this point, many Turks had come to inextricably associate the name Constantine with King Konstantinos I of Greece, who had led multiple invasions of Turkey and was widely reviled throughout the land. It’s really awkward when the most populous city in your country happens to share a name with one of your country’s most hated enemies. Imagine if New York City were instead named Osama bin Laden City. That’s basically how the name Constantinople would have seemed to many Turks in the early twentieth century.

Thus, as a result of the Turkish government’s wishes, Constantinople became known in English from that point onwards as İstanbul. In the Greek language, however, the city is still generally known as Κωνσταντινούπολη (Konstantinoúpoli), or sometimes just Πόλη (Póli). This is more out of tradition and force of habit than out of irredentism.

Nowadays, although many Greek people still feel a very strong attachment to the city of İstanbul, there are very few Greek people who would seriously support the idea of Greece trying to “reclaim” it. It’s an idea that occasionally pops up among right-wing extremists, but has otherwise disappeared from political discourse.