Istanbul

Overview

Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city and its principal economic, financial and cultural center. It stands on both sides of the Bosphorus, where the strait meets the Sea of Marmara, and occupies a crossroads between Europe and Asia. Ships passing through the Bosphorus connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean Sea through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. The city’s position has made it a center of trade, imperial government, migration and diplomacy for centuries. More than 40,000 ships use the Bosphorus each year. Although Ankara replaced Istanbul as Turkey’s capital after World War I, Istanbul retained its commercial weight and international reach.

Known as Constantinople for much of its history, the city became the capital of the Ottoman Empire after Sultan Mehmed II conquered it in 1453. Ottoman Istanbul housed communities speaking many languages and practicing different religions. Its Jewish community grew under Ottoman rule, developed important religious and commercial institutions, and organized the redemption of Jewish captives brought to the city in the seventeenth century. In the modern era, Istanbul has also been a setting for attacks on Jews, mass protests, consequential elections and regional security activity. Its size and resources give local politics national significance: the city accounts for around one-third of Turkey’s economic output and nearly half its tax base.

Geography

Istanbul lies in northwestern Turkey, with districts on the European and Asian shores of the Bosphorus. The strait divides the city while joining its neighborhoods through bridges, tunnels and ferries. To the south, the Bosphorus opens into the Sea of Marmara; to the north, it reaches the Black Sea. These waters place Istanbul on routes between inland Black Sea ports and the Mediterranean, as well as overland routes between Europe and Asia. Geography has shaped both the city’s prosperity and its strategic value to governments concerned with trade and naval passage.

The Golden Horn, an inlet on the European side, provided a sheltered harbor for Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul. During the Ottoman period, nearby settlements became quarters of the expanding city. Galata stood between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus; Eyüp lay toward the inlet’s northwestern end; and Üsküdar developed on the Bosphorus’s eastern shore. These districts illustrate how Istanbul grew beyond the old walled city into a wider urban center on both continents. The concentration of waterways, harbors and land routes helped it function as an administrative and commercial capital under Ottoman rule.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has promoted the proposed Istanbul Canal, a waterway linking the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara along a route parallel to the Bosphorus. Supporters have presented it as an alternative shipping route, while Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has become a leading opponent, particularly over its environmental effects. The project could also reopen disputes over passage through the Turkish straits, now regulated by the 1936 Montreux Convention, and heighten Turkey’s tensions with Cyprus and Greece. Those tensions could affect Israel’s interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Israel has developed closer ties with both countries. These are potential consequences of a proposed canal, not effects already established.

Ancient and biblical history

The settlement that became Istanbul began as Byzantium, a Greek city on a site valued for access to the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. In the fourth century CE, the Roman emperor Constantine established it as a new imperial capital and gave it the name Constantinople. It later served as the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Its walls, harbors and position between major trade routes made it one of the eastern Mediterranean’s most consequential cities before the Ottoman conquest. Hagia Sophia, built in the Byzantine period, remains among its best-known monuments and reflects the city’s successive Christian and Ottoman histories.

Istanbul is not a biblical setting. Its connection to the ancient history of the Land of Israel is illustrated instead by an object held in the city: the Gezer Calendar. Discovered in 1908, the tenth-century BCE Paleo-Hebrew inscription describes agricultural tasks by month. Its present location in Istanbul should be distinguished from its place of origin at Gezer. The artifact belongs to the history of ancient Hebrew writing, while the city’s own ancient history begins with Byzantium and its later development as Constantinople.

Jewish history

Jews used Qustantina or Qustandina for Constantinople; these forms gave rise to the Hebrew name Kushta. After Mehmed II captured the city from the Byzantine emperor in 1453, he designated areas for Jewish settlement. Some Jews transported from Salonika settled near Jews’ Gate. Subsequent movement from other Ottoman lands and beyond helped form a substantial urban community. By 1477, records counted 1,647 Jewish households in Istanbul, about 11 percent of the city’s households. Jewish life became part of the wider religious and linguistic diversity of the Ottoman capital.

Jewish residents contributed to Istanbul’s commerce, scholarship and printing. David and Samuel ibn Nahmias established a Hebrew printing press in the city in 1493, soon after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. A well-known press also operated near one of Istanbul’s Jewish quarters in the late sixteenth century. Don Solomon Ibn Ya’ish settled in Istanbul in 1580 and became an Ottoman diplomat and farmer of the city’s customs revenues. He served Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III and remained involved in imperial politics until his death in 1603. His career shows how an individual Jew could hold an influential economic and diplomatic position at the Ottoman court.

Istanbul’s Jewish networks extended to other Ottoman cities. Rabbi Isaac HaLevi Dayan left Istanbul in 1609 and became the first rabbi of İzmir. Jews also moved to İzmir from Istanbul, Safed, Ankara, Mediterranean islands, Italy and Holland. Such movement connected families, rabbis and merchants across the empire and Europe. The community nevertheless faced hostility. In 1633, a blood libel falsely accused Istanbul’s Jews of murdering a Turkish child before Passover. The accusation drew on an antisemitic fiction, not evidence of a crime.

After the 1648–49 massacres in Poland, Cossacks, Tatars and Ukrainians sold Jewish captives in Istanbul. Local Jews redeemed thousands of them and sent an emissary to Italy and Holland to raise funds for further redemptions. Istanbul thus became both a market in which captives were sold and a center of organized Jewish relief. The effort depended on the city’s established community and its links with Jews elsewhere. Alongside its religious and commercial institutions, the redemption campaign forms a major part of Istanbul’s early modern Jewish history.

Turkey’s Jewish community remains concentrated largely in Istanbul, and the city has continued to host public Jewish life. A public Hanukkah celebration in Ortaköy Square in 2015 included the lighting of a large menorah and blessings recited over a loudspeaker. Israel has maintained an embassy in Ankara and a consulate general in Istanbul. Those ties and public events coexist with a history of attacks and intimidation directed at the city’s Jews and synagogues.

Modern history

Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453 made the city the Ottoman capital. It remained a center of imperial administration and commerce for centuries, accommodating communities of different languages and faiths. Istanbul also figured in the empire’s relations with regions to its east. Kurdish diplomat Idris Betlis persuaded 25 Kurdish princes to transfer their allegiance from the Safavids to the Ottoman government in Istanbul. After World War I and the empire’s collapse, Turkey transferred its capital to Ankara. Istanbul lost its role as seat of government but remained the country’s foremost commercial and cultural city.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political career is closely tied to Istanbul. He became the city’s mayor in 1994, gaining the platform from which he rose to national leadership. The city’s economic scale and municipal resources later made its elections especially important to his ruling Justice and Development Party. Istanbul accounts for around one-third of Turkey’s economy, while its tax base approaches half the national total. For Erdoğan’s opponents, winning the city offered a visible challenge to a political movement that had controlled its mayoralty for 25 years.

On May 31, 2013, Turkish riot police used tear gas and water cannons against a peaceful sit-in opposing the removal of trees from an Istanbul park. At least 12 people were injured. The police assault helped turn a local environmental protest near Taksim Square into wider demonstrations against Erdoğan’s government. Protesters raised concerns about police conduct and the government’s direction before the planned 2014 presidential election. The confrontation made Istanbul the center of a national argument over public space, dissent and the use of state force.

In the March 31, 2019 mayoral election, opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu defeated Erdoğan’s candidate, Binali Yıldırım, by less than one percentage point. The result ended 25 years of control of the mayoralty by Erdoğan’s party and its predecessors. Millions of Kurds live in Istanbul, and Kurdish voters helped the opposition secure its March victory. On May 6, Turkey’s election board canceled the result and ordered another vote for June 23. As the rerun approached, Erdoğan allowed imprisoned Kurdistan Workers’ Party leader Abdullah Öcalan to issue his first public statement in four years, a move tied to efforts to win Kurdish support.

The annulment sought to reverse a narrow opposition victory. In the June rerun, İmamoğlu won by more than nine percentage points, with turnout roughly comparable to March’s. The much wider margin exposed the political cost of forcing a second vote and established İmamoğlu as a leading national opponent of Erdoğan. Istanbul’s result carried significance beyond municipal administration because the city had been central to Erdoğan’s own rise and remained Turkey’s principal economic prize. İmamoğlu’s later opposition to the Istanbul Canal also placed city government at the center of a major national infrastructure debate.

Security

Istanbul’s Jewish institutions have repeatedly been attacked. Neve Shalom Synagogue suffered a deadly assault in 1986. During the government-orchestrated Istanbul pogrom of 1955, attackers destroyed 73 churches and a synagogue. These events affected different religious communities, while making clear the vulnerability of Jewish worship sites in periods of organized violence. They form part of the city’s modern history alongside its long record of Jewish settlement and public religious life.

In November 2003, suicide car bombers attacked two Istanbul synagogues, killing 23 people. Five days later, twin car bombs targeted a British bank and a British diplomatic mission in the city. Those later attacks killed 27 people, including Britain’s consul general, and wounded about 450. The sequence struck Jewish worshippers and British interests in the same month. The synagogue bombings were attacks on Istanbul’s Jewish community, rather than incidental damage in a broader campaign.

In July 2017, members of an ultranationalist group threw stones at Neve Shalom Synagogue and kicked its gates. They threatened to besiege places of worship and prevent worship at the synagogue. Turkish state media subsequently used images of the assault to promote anti-Israel protests. Turkey’s Jewish community warned that the coverage made Turkish Jews a target. The violence and threats were directed at a Jewish place of worship and its congregants; their effect cannot be reduced to a dispute over foreign policy toward Israel.

Other armed attacks have underscored Istanbul’s exposure as a large transport and commercial center. The PKK bombed Istanbul, Antalya and Marmaris on August 27 and 28, killing three people and wounding more than 100 across the attacks. In 2016, an attack at Istanbul Atatürk Airport associated with the Islamic State killed 45 people and wounded 147 by the figures reported in early July. Such incidents have affected residents, visitors and transport facilities, while prompting security responses in a city whose routes carry international traffic.

Istanbul has also figured in regional intelligence and militant activity. In April 2022, Mossad exposed plans by the Quds Force to assassinate an Israeli consular worker in Istanbul, an American general in Germany and a journalist in France. Israeli concerns about Hamas, a terrorist organization, have included its activity in Istanbul. The city’s diplomatic presence, travel connections and regional reach give such threats consequences beyond Turkey.

Present day

Istanbul remains Turkey’s main economic, financial and cultural center despite Ankara’s status as capital. Its municipal government oversees a vast city whose transport, housing, environment and public services affect millions. The Bosphorus continues to carry heavy international shipping, while debate over the Istanbul Canal links local environmental concerns to strait passage, Turkey’s relations with neighboring states and Israel’s Eastern Mediterranean interests. İmamoğlu’s resistance to the canal illustrates how Istanbul’s elected leadership can shape a national policy dispute.

The city also hosts international political meetings. Mahmoud Abbas addressed a summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul in April 2016. On September 24, 2020, Fatah’s Jibril Rajoub and Hamas’s Saleh al-Arouri met there as Israel’s normalization agreements with Arab states challenged their diplomatic strategy. In April 2024, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh met an Algerian parliamentary delegation led by Ahmed Kharchi at an Istanbul conference. These meetings show the city’s continuing use as a venue for regional diplomacy and political coordination.

Istanbul’s role extends to international debates over religion and rights. The 2015 Jeddah religious-freedom conference was the fifth Istanbul Process meeting on implementation of UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. In a separate episode, a Saudi court sentenced Jeddah professor and imam Abdullah Basfar to 12 years in prison in 2022 after prayers he had led at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia in 2014. The cases differ, but both place Istanbul within discussions reaching beyond Turkey about religious practice, state authority and freedom of expression. Across its history, the city’s position between continents has made events within it consequential far beyond its shores.