Istanbul (founded as Byzantium in 667 BC) is Turkey’s most mythic city, imagined at once as bridge and boundary, where Europe and Asia face each other across the Bosphorus. On arrival, it feels densely inhabited rather than staged: domes and minarets hold the skyline, ferries stitch the shores, and steep streets slide from imperial stone into apartment blocks, workshops, and markets.

As Constantinople and later the Ottoman capital, it learned to absorb power without turning itself into a display case; Byzantine and Ottoman monuments still set the city’s visual grammar, but they sit inside a place that keeps moving. Today it remains the country’s economic engine, with constant building, heavy traffic, and rising costs alongside stubborn street-level vitality, and a food culture built less on ceremony than on sharing—meze, grills, and sweets drawn into long, social evenings.