On January 17th, Jocelyn Brooks gave members a very professional talk entitled ‘Istanbul: City of Intrigue’.
Istanbul is known as a city of Christian and Islamic faiths, one of the world’s richest cities and located half in Europe and half in Asia. Founded in 500BC as Byzantium, it was renamed Constantinople when that Roman Emperor became Christian and made it the capital of his Empire. There are beautiful basilicas, later turned sensitively into mosques, covering Christian mosaics. Many other beautiful mosques and palaces dot the skyline.
In the 15th century Ottoman Turks invaded the city, renaming it Islamabad (City of Islam). The 19th century saw the height of the Ottoman Empire, and the war in nearby Crimea saw Russia defeated by an alliance of France, UK and the Ottoman Empire. Florence Nightingale was nursing the fighting men, and had Scutari hospital built in Istanbul.
In WW1 the village of Gallipoli, near Istanbul, was the location of a bloody defeat in an attempted invasion ordered by Winston Churchill. At the end of WW1, Mustafa Attaturk became Turkey’s first President, and since his death in 1938 the conflicts between faiths has continued.