Hey just real quick, I started writing this video before the earthquake in Southeastern
Turkey happened, but as I don’t want to profit off tragedy, I’ve left links
to some good charities you can donate to in the pinned comment. And if you’re Turkish yourself,
feel free to suggest more charities in the replies to that comment. Okay on with the video.
Geography can often play an important role in deciding which countries become international
superpowers, which ones fall into the void of nonexistence, and which ones just, you know,
chill. However this is even more so the case with the cities of the world. Cities
are virtually built by their geography– and I guess technically also the people
who live there– and one of the best places to see this in practice is Turkey’s largest city
Istanbul– or Constantinople, or Byzantium, or Miklagard, or Tsarigrad, or Nova Roma,
or whatever you want to call this place. So what made Istanbul such an important city as to be the
capital of multiple major empires for over 1,500 years? I mean I imagine it’s extremely obvious,
but let’s roll with it, I just want to talk about the geography of this place.
[Intro]
Istanbul lies in the northwest of the Republic of Turkey, famous for being
situated on two continents, with the western side in Europe and the eastern side in Asia,
separated by the Bosporus, an important strait which connects the Black Sea to
the Mediterranean. The Bosporus is thus an extremely important waterway for Russia,
as its ports outside the Black Sea tend to freeze over in the winter. Without this strait,
Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and Georgia would all be functionally landlocked,
and if you include the Volga-Don Canal connecting the waterways to the Caspian Sea,
so too would this be the case for Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. Sorry Uzbekistan.
The first settlement in the area was founded by King Byzas in 667 BC, sailing there from Megara
after being told by the Oracle to seek a port opposite the land of the blind. Arriving in
the area, he found a natural harbor opposite the already existing colony of Chalcedon in what is
now the district of Kadıköy, interpreting this place to be the ‘land of the blind’,
as surely one must have been blind to have missed *this* good of a place to found a city.
And so he founded a city there. This harbor would be situated in an inlet known as the Golden Horn–
or Haliç in Turkish, giving its name to the metro station which straddles both sides of
the inlet– separating what is now Fatih from Beyoğlu, where Venetian and Genoese merchants
would establish a base known as Pera in the Late Middle Ages. This setup also made the core of the
city easy to defend, with the famous Theodosian Walls defending the city for over 1,000 years.
The city’s broader location would also make it an ideal location for a more easterly-focused
late Roman Empire, one which was at near constant war with the Sassanian Persian Empire. In a 5km/h
world, being 1,000 kilometers closer to your biggest rival so you can defend your border
isn’t always a bad idea. Thus, when Constantine I refounded the city to be a new Roman capital,
the city grew from a small port city to the largest city in the world. When Constantinople
was conquered in 1453, the Ottomans too would utilize the city’s location,
being not comparatively far away from the Indian Ocean and its massive trade networks that Western
Europe was mostly left out from. Of course nowadays Istanbul is not the capital of the
modern Republic of Turkey, though you can see why in this video I already made a couple years ago.
This political importance– which was mainly due to the city’s geographical importance– also inspired
its religious importance in the two largest religions on the planet. The city serves to
this day as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the sort of ‘first among
equals’ of all the several patriarchs within the Eastern Orthodox Church. In Islam too, the Ottoman
Sultans would claim the title of Caliph, at first disputedly under Murad I, and then with a bit more
meaning to the term after the Empire conquered Mecca and Medina under Selim I, 200 years later,
with this tradition only dying out when the Empire itself was disbanded in the 1920’s.
Travel across the Bosporus in modern times is facilitated by three road bridges, a road tunnel,
a rail tunnel, and a crap-ton of ferries running on several different routes across the strait
and to the Prince Islands to the south. Before the Bosporus Bridge opened in 1973,
there were no ways of crossing the Bosporus other than by boat, though that doesn’t mean the idea
wasn’t floated around in the past, with Leonardo da Vinci proposing a design to Sultan Bayezid II
in 1502. The Marmaray Tunnel was completed in 2013, served by the Marmaray commuter rail,
and allowing freight trains to pass through during off hours. Before that, railways going in and
out of the city simply ended at the strait, with Sirkeci station serving routes to and from Europe,
Haydarpaşa serving routes to and from the Middle East, and in between the stations… eh,
yeah maybe get a boat, or something? To be fair, back in these times traveling by ship was often
much easier than traveling by land. Istanbul is also a very hilly city,
with certain routes like Taksim to Kabataş or Beyoğlu to Karaköy served by funicular railways,
with the Tünel on the F2 line being the oldest fully-underground railway
line in continental Europe– which is a pretty specific flex to make, but okay.
What‘s sort of ironic about the city‘s position then is the lack of freshwater anywhere within
its borders. With a refounded Constantinople‘s population skyrocketing in the 4th century,
the Romans solved the problem with one of the things they‘re so famous for building: aqueducts,
with the aqueduct of Valens eventually connecting a whole series of aqueducts spread throughout the
area to the cisterns of the city, the most famous of which being the Basilica Cistern.
In modern times, the city‘s water is mostly provided from groundwater and surface water
reservoirs, though the local geography leads to the awkward situation where most of the
population lives on the European side, but most of the freshwater lies on the Asian side. Another
major problem plaguing the city’s water supply is illegal construction near the reservoirs, and
those building codes not being enforced, resulting in pollutants often leaking into the water.
These building codes not being properly enforced however can also have a far more dire side effect.
Istanbul– and Turkey as a whole– is vulnerable to earthquakes. Aside from the East Anatolian Fault
which caused the recent earthquake in Southeastern Turkey and Northern Syria, the North Anatolian
Fault runs along the north of the country, underneath the Pontic Alps, and directly around
the Sea of Marmara. This has played a massive role in the city’s history and development,
even back into ancient times, with parts of the Theodosian Wall falling to an earthquake
in 447 and having to be quickly repaired before Attila the Hun’s armies could reach the city.
So why is Turkey building another canal right to the west of the city when there’s already
a perfectly good natural waterway? Due to the terms of the Montreux Convention,
Turkey has to guarantee safe passage for ships going through the Bosporus, but they can’t
actually charge anyone passage, like Egypt or Panama can with their important waterways. Thus,
a new canal just to the west, which ships will have to pay to use, but for some it might be worth
it, seeing just how crowded the Bosporus is… like seriously, it’s like the downtown Manhattan rush
hour of waterways. Basically, Turkey can use this new canal to charge people to use the fast lane.
Istanbul is a city whose geography seems overpowered on first glance, and in many ways
it is, however upon closer inspection,
it’s clear that the city has just as many geographic flaws as it does blessings.