Tag: Constantinople

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.

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Why Are the Byzantines Significant?

At the time I started writing this article, the most upvoted answer to the question “Why was the Byzantine Empire important in world history?” on Quora was an answer by Bryden Walsh that basically says that the Byzantines aren’t important in world history and that the only reason why anyone imagines that the Byzantines have any historical relevance is because people have overromanticized them due to their association with the old Roman Empire.

Walsh bitterly insists at one point in his answer, “But unlike the neighbouring Islamic civilisations, or the Catholic societies of the west, Byzantium did nothing to move human civilisation forward.” Near the end of the article, he says that the modern world doesn’t owe “anything to Byzantium” at all and that the modern world is “the opposite of everything the Byzantines believed in.”

This is, unfortunately, a reflection of the view towards the Byzantine Empire that has dominated the west for centuries. Despite its perennial appeal, this view is also totally inaccurate; the Byzantine Empire has affected the modern world in ways that few people even realize and there is much to be gained from studying it.

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