Names of Istanbul

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ottoman constitution of 1876 declares, in plain Turkish, that 'The capital city of the Ottoman State is İstanbul.' That might seem straightforward, until you realize that the empire's most formal correspondence consistently called the same city something else. Istanbul's names have never been simply sequential. They coexisted, they competed, and they served very different political purposes at the same time. This city was renamed by Greek colonists, by Roman emperors, by Ottoman sultans, and by the founders of the Turkish Republic. Each renaming was an argument about power, about religion, about whose language commanded authority. And several of the old names have never fully surrendered. Greeks today still call the city Constantinople, or simply 'the City.' How a single city accumulated so many identities is a question worth pursuing all the way back to the city's very first recorded name.

• 2. The Oldest Names

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  Pliny the Elder's Natural History preserves the city's oldest recorded name: Lygos. Its origin is entirely unknown. Its meaning is entirely unknown. Simon Zsolt has suggested the name was etymologically related to the Greek name for the Ligures. Zsolt derived this from the Anatolian ethnonym Ligyes, a tribe that appears to have been neighbors to the Paphlagonians. That remains a suggestion, not a settled answer.

  Greek colonists from Megara arrived in 667 BC and introduced a new name: Byzantium. Scholars believe this name predated the Greeks themselves. It is thought to be Thracian or Illyrian in origin, possibly drawn from a personal name, Byzas. Ancient Greek legend cast Byzas as a king, the leader of the Megarean colonists and the mythological founder of the city.

  From the 9th century onward, derivations of 'Byzantius' and 'Byzantinus' were applied to gold Byzantine coinage. In French this became besant d'or, in Italian bisante, and in English besant, byzant, or bezant. English usage of the coin term dates back to the 12th century.

  Hieronymus Wolf introduced 'Byzantium' as a name for the eastern Roman state as a whole only in 1555. By then, the empire had been gone for over a century. Its inhabitants had always called it the Roman Empire, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων. Long before Wolf applied his label, the city had already been through several more transformations. One of them began with a construction project so ambitious it required an entirely new name.

• 3. Constantine's City

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  On the 11th of May, 330, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great made Byzantium the formal new eastern capital of his empire. Before that ceremony, he had undertaken a massive construction project. The city was essentially rebuilt at monumental scale, partly modeled on Rome itself. The names coined during this period reflected the ambition: 'the New, second Rome,' 'Eastern Rome,' and Roma Constantinopolitana, among others.

  A century earlier, the emperor Septimius Severus, who ruled from 193 to 211, had already attempted a renaming. He called the city Augusta Antonina, in honor of his son Antoninus, who would later reign as Caracalla. That name lasted only briefly.

  The phrase 'New Rome' outlasted the construction enthusiasm. The Third Canon of the First Council of Constantinople, held in 381, applied the name formally. In later centuries, Greek writers reached for 'New Rome' particularly when challenging Rome's religious authority. The title became a weapon in the East-West polemics that intensified around the Great Schism. It still survives today as part of the official title of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

  The name the world knows better, Constantinople, was first officially attested during the reign of Theodosius II, who ruled from 408 to 450. Stephanus of Byzantium noted two competing spellings: Konstantinoupolis and Kostantinoupolis. That variation at the naming itself foreshadowed the larger proliferation that would spread across every language in contact with the city.

• 4. The Greek Inside Istanbul

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  The modern Turkish name İstanbul has been attested in writing since the 10th century. The earliest records appear in Armenian and Arabic sources, without the initial İ-, before Ottoman sources picked it up. Its etymology is more surprising than the name itself.

  A phrase from Medieval Greek, 'εἰς τὴν πόλιν,' meaning 'to the city,' was the first proposed origin. A 2015 review of the scholarship concluded that the more likely ancestor is the colloquial Middle Greek phrase 'στην Πόλι(ν).' That phrase carries the sense of 'in Constantinople' or possibly 'to Constantinople.' The Greek root Polis sits at the heart of the modern name.

  Navarino was formed from an earlier Greek form, Avarino. Satines folded in from Athines. This type of borrowing was common throughout the region. Turkish place names derived from Greek in the same way include İzmit, from the Greek Nicomedia, and İznik, from Nicaea. Samsun came from Amisos, and İstanköy from the Greek island Kos.

  İstanbul's initial i- is an epenthetic vowel. Turkish phonotactics prohibit syllabic consonant clusters, so a vowel was inserted to break up the St- at the start of the word. The same process produced Turkish istasyon from the French station, and ızgara from the Greek schára.

  İstanbul originally named only the core walled city. Its shorter cousin, Stamboul, strips away the initial i-. That form appeared in Arabic sources of the 10th century and Armenian sources of the 12th. An even shorter form, Bulin, drawn from the Greek Poli(n) alone, survives in modern Armenian. İstanbul was the common name in Turkish speech long before the 1453 conquest. But the Ottoman chanceries consistently reached for a different name when formality demanded it.

• 5. Ottoman Naming Tensions

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  After the Ottoman conquest of 1453, the empire's administrators settled on Kostantiniyye as the most formal official name for the city. The term was an Arabic calque of Constantinople, recognizable across the Islamic world. It appeared in the complex formulae Ottoman clerks attached to formal documents to name the seat of government. It remained in official use through most of the period up to the fall of the empire in 1922.

  İstanbul ağası was the title of the empire's highest military commander in the city. İstanbul efendisi was the title of the highest civil magistrate. These were formal titles, not street speech. Both names existed in the official language simultaneously.

  Sultan Mehmed II was credited by some contemporaries with coining the name Islambol, which appeared shortly after the 1453 conquest. Evliya Çelebi, the 17th-century Ottoman chronicler, described it as the common Turkish name of his day. Between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, Islambol reached official use. The first coinage stamped with the name dates to 1730, during the reign of Sultan Mahmud I.

  Bāb-i ʿĀlī, the Sublime Porte, was another way of naming the city's authority. Literally a gate of Topkapı Palace, it served as a metonym for the Ottoman government itself. Der-i Saʿādet, 'Abode of Felicity,' and Āsitāne, a Persian-origin word meaning 'threshold,' referred to the imperial court. Modern historians continue to use these terms when writing about Ottoman governance, much as 'Whitehall' stands in for the British government.

  In 19th-century Turkish book-printing, the formal impressum page used Kostantiniyye, even as Ottoman poets and writers reached freely for İstanbul in their verses.

• 6. Names from Abroad

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  During the 10th to 12th centuries, Constantinople was one of the two largest cities in the world. The other was Baghdad. That scale brought the city into the awareness of peoples far beyond the Byzantine frontier, each of whom developed a distinct name for it.

  'Queen of Cities,' Βασιλὶς τῶν πόλεων, was among the honorary titles Byzantines used in formal contexts. 'Reigning City,' Βασιλεύουσα, functioned as both a noun and an adjective. In everyday speech, these formalities collapsed into hē Polis. The usage persists today; in Armenian, it takes the form Polis in the Eastern dialect and Bolis in the Western Armenian dialect prevalent in the city.

  Medieval Vikings, known in Byzantine sources as Varangians, made contact with the empire through their expansion across eastern Europe. They used the Old Norse name Mikligarðr, combining mikill, meaning 'big,' with garðr, meaning 'wall' or 'stronghold.' The Icelandic sagas record this name.

  East and South Slavic languages settled on Tsarigrad or Carigrad, meaning 'City of the Tsar.' The name combines the Slavonic words for emperor and city. The term remains a living alternative in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Slovene. Romanian borrowed the form from Slavic as Țarigrad, though Constantinopol was the far more widely used Romanian name.

  Arabic sources used Rūmiyyat al-kubra, meaning 'Great City of the Romans.' Persian contributed Takht-e Rum, 'Throne of the Romans,' and Kayser-i Zemin, built on the title for Caesar. The Judaeo-Spanish community within the city used Kushta or Kostán as short forms. Estambol named the historic central peninsula, while Kosta referred to the entire Istanbul province. The community called themselves Estambulí or Estambullí.

  Most modern Western languages have since adopted a form of İstanbul, but the timing of that shift was not natural drift. It required a formal diplomatic request from the Turkish Republic.

• 7. The 1930 Transition

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  In 1928, Turkey changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin script. Until that moment, 'Constantinople' was still the standard Latin-script spelling used by Western countries. The pressure to standardize had been building.

  In 1929, the Turkish government formally advocated for the use of 'Istanbul' in English. T. R. Ybarra of The New York Times described the situation that year. In Ybarra's words: "'Istambul' (our usual form for the word is 'Stamboul') has always been the Turkish name for the whole of Constantinople." The Observer stated plainly: 'To the Turks themselves it never was Constantinople, but Istanbul.'

  Lloyd's agents were informed that year that telegrams must now be addressed 'Istanbul' or 'Stamboul.' London's Times reported that mail could still reach 'Constantinople.' The New York Times contradicted this, stating that mail addressed to Constantinople might no longer be delivered. The U.S. State Department settled the question for American officials in May 1930, adopting Istanbul formally.

  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western European sources used 'Constantinople' for the city as a whole. 'Stamboul' was reserved for the historic central peninsula inside the Byzantine walls. After 1930, Istanbul absorbed both usages.

  Eldem Edhem contributed a major entry on Istanbul to the Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. Eldem observed that many Turkish historians and members of the public consider 'Constantinople,' as a name for the Ottoman city, to be 'politically incorrect.' That view held even though, historically, the name was accurate. Not every language has followed the new convention. In Slovene, Carigrad remains largely preferred over Istanbul, a concrete sign that the 1930 request did not land with the same weight everywhere.