Istanbul - city of legends and fairy tales

Historic fact or stories related on a winter?s night around a camp fire? There?s no end to Istanbul?s extraordinary life A city of 400 legends and 100 fairy tales could only be Istanbul, the mysterious city overlooking the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus Strait and the Golden Horn. Oh, what stories these walls and streets could tell if only we could hear them.

Istanbul?s stories begin some 8000 years ago as we know now from the excavations for the Marmaray Tunnel. We?ll probably never know whether its location between Asia and Europe was a staging point for the Neanderthals and the later hunter-gatherers and farmers who may have been the source of the Indo-European languages we see today in Europe and seem to have spread west through Anatolia.

 Anyone who looks at Istanbul?s history will learn that its eponymous founder was Prince Byzas who was supposed to have come from Megara in Greece in 666 B.C. but they?re less likely to know about the various Greek gods that were associated with it such as Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hecate and many more. A number of the villages established along the Bosphorus were founded by one or another of the gods or their offspring. One legend has it that when a king in Thrace married a nymph, he was given the area on which Topkap? Palace was built as a wedding gift. A second legend has Poseidon?s son being nursed when he was a baby by a nymph who lived near a spring and when he grew up he founded Byzantium, giving the city his own name.

And of course, the famous Argonauts, including Jason and Medea, sailed through the Bosphorus in search of the Golden Fleece at the east end of the Black Sea and on returning were hotly pursued by Medea?s father or, in some versions, her brother. Medea established a...