Bosphorus Straits

Istanbul has no rival anywhere. It spells adventure. It has the ingredients that unite to create glamour, excitement and mystery. Centuries of invaders have been intrigued with this magic and majestic city with its 340 Byzantine columns, 500 mosques, fabulous palaces, fountains, cisterns, baths, churches, wells and covered bazaars. NO city on earth has so many old buildings of beauty and distinction.

Istanbul is no myth. Its reality lies in its extraordinary history that goes back through countless phases to the first colonisation in 657 BC by the Megarians who named it Byzantium after their commander Byzas. The Roman Emperor Constantine elevated Byzantium to the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire in the third century AD and renamed it Constantinople after himself. The Turks finally brought the Eastern Empire to an end when they burst through the city walls in 1453 and established Constantinople as capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Istanbul is a bridge between Europe and Asia, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, a position that endows it with one of the most unique and beautiful settings in the world. For, between the hills on the European and Asiatic shores flows the Bosphorus, the brightest gem in the diadem of nature.

“This beautiful strait, sometimes spelled Bosporus and sometimes Bosphorus, was so called from the earliest ages by the ancients; from the mythology of 10, the mistress of Jupiter, having passed over it in the shape of a cow. It resembles the Dardanelles, in length, breadth and current, and like it, is a narrow separation which divides Europe from Asia; but it has many features familiar to itself. Instead of being a solitary stream running between deserted shores, it is a body of water full of life and animation, winding its way through banks covered with palaces and villages, shaded with magnificent forest trees, presenting to the eye, at every mile, a new scene of crowded existence.”

The Turks have named this natural channel, dividing the continents of Europe and Asia, while joining the Black Sea to the Mediterranean by way of the Sea of Marmara and the Straits of Dardanelles, BOGAZICI, which means “the inner strait.”

The Bosphorus, Ox-ford in English, runs for about twenty miles, at times like a river, at times as if a land-enclosed lake; then, before joining the Black Sea, it becomes a rocky, wild channel. The Bosphorus breathes calmly and regularly, and the flow of caiques echo the rhythm with their slow splashes. Not only does the Bosphorus electrify the traveller by its light, but it also intoxicates him by the white incandescence of the sun on its bosom with blue sky pouring into it. It runs through the city of Istanbul, splitting it into two halves the city built on seven hills and described by one of her early foreign lovers, Julia Pardoe: Its clear calm sky, its glittering sea, its amphitheatre of thickly-peopled hills, its geographical position, its political importance and above all, its surprising novelty, tend to make everyday in that gorgeous scene, and under that sunny sky, a season of intense enjoyment.

BBC