Tag: Constantinople

  • Hippodrome in modern-day Istanbul

    Hippodrome in modern-day Istanbul

    Imagine if the Roman Hippodrome of Constantinople was still in modern-day Istanbul?

    The Hippodrome of Constantinople was a circus that was the sporting and social centre of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. Today it is a square in Istanbul, Turkiye, known as Sultanahmet Square. The word hippodrome comes from the Greek hippos, horse, and dromos, path or way. For this reason, it is sometimes also called Atmeydanı (Horse Square) in Turkish. Horse racing and chariot racing were popular pastimes in the ancient world and hippodromes were common features of Greek cities in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine eras.

    Imagine the Roman Hippodrome of Constantinople in modern day Istanbul

    Recreation created by Dogukan Palaman.

  • Why didn’t Greece get Constantinople after World War One?

    Why didn’t Greece get Constantinople after World War One?

    Greece (after Russia) really wanted to get its hands on Constantinople after World War One and the surrender of the Ottoman Empire. And given its history as a Greek city and the heart of the classical Greek world, why didn’t Greece get the city? To find out watch this short and simple animated history documentary.

    Why didn’t Greece get Constantinople after World War One? (Short Animated Documentary)

  • Turkey’s musical archive preserved due to Armenian musician Hambardzum Limonchyan

    Turkey’s musical archive preserved due to Armenian musician Hambardzum Limonchyan

    YEREVAN, MARCH 16, ARMENPRESS. A special site has been created in Turkey through which the Ottoman music archive – preserved due to Armenian musician Hambardzum Limonchyan – will be introduced to the public. As “Armenpress” reports Turkish newspaper “Zaman” informs about that.

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    The newspaper points out that the application of notes in Turkish music started in the 19th century during the period of reign of sultan Selim III.  Due to Sultan Selim’s wish Armenian composer and musician Hambardzum Limonchyan from Constantinople discovered a type of musical notation which received the name “Hambardzum’s Music Notation” in Turkey.

    Among other things the Turkish newspaper stated: “Due to that musical notation applied in Turkey in the 19th century it was possible to prevent the loss of numerous musical works created in two centuries in Turkey. The majority of those works were kept in archives for a long while. Now lots of works recorded in “Hambardzum’s Music Notation” will be accessible for the Turkish public due to the newly created site.”

    via Turkey’s musical archive preserved due to Armenian musician Hambardzum Limonchyan | ARMENPRESS Armenian News Agency.

  • Best of Our Blogs: “Isaac in Turkey” explains difference between Istanbul and Constantinople

    Best of Our Blogs: “Isaac in Turkey” explains difference between Istanbul and Constantinople

    Life

    Best of Our Blogs: “Isaac in Turkey” explains difference between Istanbul and Constantinople

    By AUBREE CUTKOMP

    acutkomp@saratogian.com

    Twitter.com/aubreecutkomp

    Isaac Handley-Miner, a junior at Hamilton College, is spending a semester abroad in Turkey. His blog, “Isaac in Turkey,” is another new addition to The Saratogian’s community travel blogs and will detail his time in Instanbul, an expedition he believes will be “rife with family history, good food, (occasionally) riveting academics, a little adventure and a lot of culture shock.”

    “I’ve received a variety of responses when I tell people I’m studying abroad (in Turkey) this semester. I got a lot of ‘That’s unique,’ quite a few ‘I hear that’s a really fun city,’ some ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ and even a couple ‘Where’s that?’ ” his inaugural post says. “But I think by far the most common reply has been neither a statement nor a question, but instead the opening line to a song: ‘Istanbul (not Constantinople)’ written by Jimmy Kennedy.”

    Handley-Miner admits he had never heard of the song until his friends began singing it immediately after hearing where he was headed. After finally listening to it, he at first “thought it was a stupid premise for a song — yes, Jimmy Kennedy, you are correct, the city formerly known as Constantinople is now referred to as Istanbul,” he wrote.

    But then Handley-Miner realized it was an interesting distinction.

    “The name Constantinople connotes, at least for me, a medieval city steeped in ancient history and conflict. Istanbul, on the other hand, brings to mind a bustling, modern city teetering both physically and culturally between Europe and the Middle East,” he wrote. “I have a lot of family history in this city, especially at the school where I will be studying — Bogazici University.”

    Handley-Miner is the “the fourth generation to be at Bogazici University and the third generation at Hamilton College. Talk about legacy,” he wrote.

    “After acknowledging the visceral difference I experience between the two names Constantinople and Istanbul, this distinction is reminiscent of my own relationship to Istanbul,” he wrote. “It’s not a perfect parallel, but I do have an almost misplaced nostalgia for my family history in Istanbul and that era; I’m also going to be having my own experience in this city decades after my father and my ancestors lived there. New meets old (no offense, dad). Modernity intersects antiquity just the way the two names, Istanbul and Constantinople, overlap to combine histories and cultures. What does this mean for me on a day-to-day basis? I have no idea. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. It gives me something to reflect on between mouthfuls of baklava.”

    Follow the blogger’s adventures in Istanbul this semester at isaacinturkey.blogspot.com.

    via Best of Our Blogs: “Isaac in Turkey” explains difference between Istanbul and Constantinople – saratogian.com.

  • Istanbul or Constantinople? Thinking About Names in Geography

    Istanbul or Constantinople? Thinking About Names in Geography

    By Patricia VollmerEmail Author

    January 17, 2013 |

    9:30 am |

    Istanbul, not Constantinople. How and why does our world’s geography keep us on our toes? Image: Flickr user Library_of_Congress.

    This past week I did some Air Force Reserve duty. As a weather officer, one of the things I do is prepare an assortment of weather “briefings” for an assortment of military decisionmakers. We look around the world and highlight the global “big ticket” weather features. We also point out other earth-science items of interest, from solar flares to earthquakes to volcano eruptions. For example, if there’s a tropical storm heading towards the Korean peninsula, we would bring that to the military decisionmakers’ attention, since we have a military interest there.

    Since I only perform my duties for one week out of every two-to-three months, I have to keep aware of changes in our procedures and schedules for our weather briefings. A more subtle change I saw last week was someone mentioning the “Arabian Gulf” on a piece of correspondence.

    What a second…I’ve heard of the Arabian Sea…and the Persian Gulf. But you keep using that word…Arabian Gulf. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

    Or does it?

    Some quick Googling led me to an article from late 2010 about the U.S. Navy quietly encouraging the term “Arabian Gulf” as opposed to “Persian Gulf” in the online U.S. Navy Style Guide. According to the article, the Iranians weren’t happy about the change in Navy nomenclature. Under the term “Arabian Gulf” in the guide, it reads, “Arabian Gulf – use instead of Persian Gulf” and under “Persian Gulf” it says, “Persian Gulf – use Arabian Gulf. ‘Gulf’ is acceptable in second reference. Note: The Arabian Sea is its own body of water and should not be confused with references to the Arabian Gulf.” In the article, you can learn quite a bit about the history of the name of that body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian peninsula.

    GeekMom Jules and I had a conversation after the big earthquake that struck British Columbia during the last time I was performing my AF Reserve work. I was talking about it on Facebook and Twitter after work on the day it happened, and I had refered to the location as “the Queen Charlotte Islands”, since that’s how I had read about it through the US Geological Survey reporting. Jules explained to me that the name had been restored to its native Haida Gwaii in 2010.

    This got me thinking about other culturally sensitive geographic naming conventions that exist in our ever-shrinking global perspectives. It happens all the time, sometimes Americans are taught one name, but Europeans might be taught another.

    Here are but a few examples of naming conventions that have changed throughout history, or have differing names based on our backgrounds. Some of the changes are internal and peaceful, many are related to external power struggles. Some of the changes are simply a matter of restoring traditional names, some are related to winning a contest for a game show. I’m not going to delve into the history of each naming convention, but I’ve offered links that you can click to explore more.

    St. Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad back to St. Petersburg

    Ceylon to Sri Lanka

    Siam to Thailand to Siam to Thailand

    Burma or Myanmar?

    Constantinople to Istanbul

    Peking to Beijing (and other Chinese geographic names…was that really a change? read the link to learn more)

    Bombay to Mumbai (similar to China’s changes)

    Yugoslavia to Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro

    Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (or was it really ever Rhodesia?)

    U.S. Civil War battle names such as Antietam vs. Sharpsburg or Manassas vs. Bull Run

    Denali vs. Mount McKinley

    The creation of the Canadian Territory of Nunavut in 1999

    Hot Springs, New Mexico to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

    The moral of the story? Keep on your toes with your geography! Things are always changing.

    Can you think of any others? I’m sure I’ve missed many; my world view is very limited!

    via Istanbul or Constantinople? Thinking About Names in Geography | GeekMom | Wired.com.

  • İstanbul and Constantinople

    İstanbul and Constantinople

    When I was young, we lived in a “Greek house.” With its iron shutters, iron gate and high-rise ceiling, our house was different from those in its vicinity.

    I also remember seeing some female Greek tourists clinging to the walls of some houses in Çeşme, where we would go in the summer. Seeing those Greek women crying, my mother would also burst into cries. For many years, I have been unable to give any meaning to those tears. Our non-Muslims had melted into thin air, leaving behind their houses, streets, churches, fountains and other “remnants,” they have always continued to be part of our lives like some sinister ghost that we cannot ward off. Despite our history textbooks that carefully avoid any mention of them and despite their names erased meticulously from every place, it seemed, they have left some sort of tiny “reminders” across the country.

    After many years, I started to ponder the country’s matters and issues, and I came to realize that the problem was a “social earthquake” that was far bigger than I as a kid could perceive. If the pre-1915 demographic percentages still applied to today’s Turkey, there would be 18 million non-Muslims living in the country. Just try to visualize 18 million non-Muslims, consisting mainly of Greeks, Armenians and Jews, living in Turkey. What sort of Turkey would it be?

    We would presumably be more self-confident. We would have non-Muslim deputies in Parliament, just as was the case with the Ottoman Assembly of Deputies (Meclis-i Mebusan). And we would not have the Kurdish issue whatsoever. We wouldn’t be a society that has lost its memory.

    For instance, we would not hang a placard reading “İstanbul since 1453” during a soccer match between Turkish and Greek national teams. My friend, Bekir Berat Özipek, who related this incident to me, said: “In essence, this placard gives the following message to Greek fans: ‘We don’t feel like we belong to this city. This city is yours, but we have just captured it’.” I don’t think there will be a better sentence that can explain gracefully the “mood” for carefully hiding Byzantine remnants and refraining from exhibiting them on the streets.

    If we had not banished non-Muslims and if we had had the courage and honesty to face the misty passages of our history, we would surely not have taken offense from writing “Constantinople” beneath the signboard for “İstanbul.” We would have found the creative courage to re-open the Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) as a church/mosque where Christians and Muslims can worship together and in peace. We would commemorate İstanbul’s Armenian architects with gratitude. We would refer to Sinan the architect, who gave so many magnificent works to the Ottoman Empire, with his original name that proves his Armenian roots, namely Armen Sinanyan. And we would bow in front of this great master respecting his real identity, and we would contemplate with ecstasy under this dome of nations where a myriad of races and religions have intermingled.

    If we did not have such complexes, we would not have discussed whether the current successor of the Greek patriarch, whose autonomy Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror revived, is ecumenical or not, and we would be boasting with the fact that our country is hosting the leader and institution of the second largest sect of Christianity. If we really had had self-confidence, we would not have denied anything about our past, and we would have taken pride in both the Muslim and Christian identities of our country. We would not attempt to love only the physical beauty of İstanbul after denying its past. Our love wouldn’t be like the adoration a crude man feels toward the physical body of a woman.

    If we had been honest, we would have more authentic knowledge about ourselves and our past, and our intelligence sharpened with honesty and self-awareness would make us give everyone their due place. We would not see murderers as heroes and true heroes as traitors.

    If all this had happened, the heterogeneous texture coming from a diversity of religions, languages and races would be a great asset for us. Turkey would become an island of peace in its region. Do you think we can do it from now on?

    Can we overcome the pestilence of nationalism that haunted us coming from the Balkans? Can we feel in our hearts the sorrows the Muslims of the Balkans and the Christians of Turkey suffer from this pathological nationalism? Can we get over the damage done to us by pathological nationalism and love İstanbul as Constantinople? What do you think?

    Orhan Kemal Cengiz

    Todays Zaman