Monuments Of Unaging Intellect

Greetings from Constantinople - reads the caption on many of the early postcards from Istanbul. Although the citiy was known by many namez through its history - Byzantion, Constantinople, Konstantiniyye, Stamboul, Istanbul - to the European visitor of the nineteenth and early twentieht centuries, it remained Constantinople, the capital of the vanished Byzantine Empire, onto which an overlay of Ottoman exoticism had been added. The postcards purchased and sent by the European visitors tell us much about the city they saw, but also how they chose to view its history. (Sunus Yazisindan)